Quotes from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin :
A passionate desire to grow, to Be, that is what we need. So back off the pusillanimous and the skeptics, the pessimists and the sad, the tired and the immobilists. Life is perpetual discovery. Life is movement.
T. XI – p. 96
In the universe, every movement of material growth is ultimately for the spirit, and every movement of spiritual growth is ultimately for Christ.
Nothing is more precious than what is you in others, and others in you
T XII p.471
The middle is more consistent than the centers.
Diary p.185, 1916
Let the universe […] take forward, for us, a face and a heart, let it personify itself, so to speak. And at once, in the atmosphere created by this hearth, the elementary attractions will find to bloom.
It is not in isolation, but in coupled units, that the two male and female portions of Nature must ascend to God.
T.XI p.77
My dearest faith is that something loving constitutes the deepest nature of the expanding universe.
Letters to Lucile Swan, p. 4
In the manner of bodies in motion, the world is held together only by its momentum and its outpouring.
The energy which feeds and weaves our inner life is primitively of a passionate nature. […] It is from the passionate reserves of Man that rise, transfigured, the heat and the light of his soul.
T.XI – p.75
There is not, concretely, Matter and Spirit: but there is only Matter becoming Spirit.
He who has understood this immense simplicity of things, he who has heard the unique note under the universal noise; he possesses the world. (…) on himself the shadow of death to realize all that the march into the future has of solitary, of hazardous and frightening, in its renewal (…)
Everything in the Universe is made by union and fertilization, – by the gathering of elements that seek each other, and merge two by two, and are reborn in a third thing.
T.XII p.281
It is not a one-on-one, nor a hand-to-hand: it is a heart-to-heart that we need.
Man, not the static center of the World, – as he thought for a long time – but the axis and arrow of the Evolution…
The Human Phenomenon, 1965 (p. 24)
To set in motion the thing, so small in appearance, that is a human activity, one needs nothing less than the attraction of an indestructible result. We walk only on the hope of an immortal conquest (…)
The man-individual is essentially family, tribe, nation. While humanity has not yet found other humanities around to look at it and explain where it is going.
The Appearance of Man
Everything can be taken back and melted in God, even the faults (…)
The Earth is round so that friendship goes around it (…)
No thing is understandable except by its history.
The future of man
The smallest thing that is formed in the world is always the product of a tremendous coincidence.
The Human Phenomenon
When for the first time, in a living person, the instinct saw itself in the mirror of itself, it is the whole World which made a step.
The Human Phenomenon
Life is born and spreads on Earth like a solitary pulse. It is of this unique wave that it is now a question of following its propagation to Man, and if possible beyond Man.
The Human Phenomenon, 1965, p. 94
Nothing is worth finding than what has never existed before.
The Vision of the Past
The human soul is made not to be alone.
Writings from the time of the war
There is not, concretely, Matter and Spirit: but there is only Matter becoming Spirit.
“We must always ‘believe in the spirit,’ that is, in the triumph of what is better and what is ahead.” Letter to Abbé Gaudefroy – p.84
“Matter is, evolutionarily, the lower reflection of God.”
Letter to Abbé Gaudefroy – p.104
“It is pure joy to give yourself to the end to something you believe in.”
Letter to A. Lacroix, September 12, 1933
“True passivity is legitimate, and is only obtained, at the end and at the maximum of activity. Always Jacob and the Angel.”
Letter to Father Gaudefroy – p. 103
“…to be at the bottom of what is bottomless! “
The Divine Environment – p. 157
“What, in fact, is it for a creature to be holy, if not to adhere to God to the maximum of his powers? – And what is it to adhere to God to the maximum, if not to fulfill, in the World organized around Christ, the exact function, humble or eminent, to which, by nature and by supernature, it is destined?
The Divine Environment, p. 57
