Top 90 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

52. “God loves everyone in the world who doesn’t love himself. Does God love God?”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

53. “We may, perhaps, imagine that the creation was finished long ago. But that would be quite wrong. It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

54. “The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

55. “This it the greatest success I can dream of for my life: to have spread a new vision of the world.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

56. “To love is to approach each other center to center.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

57. “The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

58. “That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

59. “You must overcome death by finding God in it.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

60. “Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

61. “We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

62. “Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

63. “Humankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

64. “From an evolutionary point of view, man has stopped moving, if he ever did move.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

65. “A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

66. “It is done. Once again the Fire has penetrated the earth, not with the sudden crash of thunderbolt, riving the mountain tops: does the Master break down doors to enter His own home? Without earthquake, or thunderclap: the flame has lit up the whole world from within.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

67. “The whole life lies in the verb seeing.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

68. “In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

69. “For in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

70. “More primordial than any idea, beauty will be manifest as the herald and generator or ideas.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

71. “At a finite distance in the future, a critical state of encounter will occur, an ultimate co-reflective Center. A focused conspiration will allure individual persons to identify with others in profound affinity. Because of thinking altogether, love will grow into Divinity.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

72. “There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

73. “The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

74. “Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves born by a current toward the open seas.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

75. “I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

76. “Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

77. “God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

78. “What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step – because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

79. “And now, as a germination of planetary dimensions, comes the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and intertwines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise them but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

80. “Individual human beings are so subtly developed through the centuries that it is strictly impermissible to compare any two men who are not contemporaries-that is to say are taken from two quite different times.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

81. “At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

82. “The reality of spirit-matter is inevitably translated into and confirmed by a structure of the spirit.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

83. “It often happens that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

84. “The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

85. “So many things which once had distressed or revolted him – the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move – all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

86. “Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

87. “El pasado me ha revelado la estructura del futuro.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

88. “In the spiritual life, as in all organic processes, everyone has their optimum and it is just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

89. “The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

90. “We now know from neural-net technology that when there are more connections between points in a system, and there is greater strength between these connections, there will be sudden leaps in intelligence, where intelligence is defined as success rate in performing a task.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

91. “Energy is the measure of that which passes from one atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression of structure.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

92. “He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

93. “Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

94. “His understanding of the method by which organisms become first individualised and then personalised gave him a number of valuable insights. Basically, the process depends on cephalisation – the differentiation of a head as the dominant guiding region of the body, forwardly directed, and containing the main sense-organs providing information about the outer world and also the main organ of co-ordination or brain.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

95. “Research students are numbered in the hundreds of thousands-soon to be millions -and they are no longer distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

96. “But this quantum only takes on its full significance when we try to define it with regard to a concrete natural movement – that is to say, in duration.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

97. “As a result, man is the only successful type which has remained as a single interbreeding group or species, and has not radiated out into a number of biologically separated assemblages.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

98. “There was something more: around this sentient protoplasmic layer, an ultimate envelope was beginning to become apparent to me, taking on its own individuality and gradually detaching itself like a luminous aura. This envelope was not only conscious but thinking, and from the time when I first became aware of it, it was always there that I found concentrated, in an ever more dazzling and consistent form, the essence or rather the very Soul of the Earth.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin