Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Time Love History

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Friendship World UN

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

You Wing Win

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Women Men Tie

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Life Art Yin

Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Love T Spiritual

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Way Very Turn

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Love Alone Way

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

Good Will Why

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pet Love Very

In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them. There they concentrate, little by little, all that is purest and most attractive in them without loss and without danger of subsequent corruption.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

War Men Anger

It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

War You Way

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

You Will Together

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Men Love Age

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

War Power Great

Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

War Death Age

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music - these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

War Nature Music

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Men Love World

The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Art World Wing

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of 'passive action,' the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy. Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me - I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

One mustn't close one's eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life - I don't mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought... The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The more nobly a man wills and acts, the more avid he becomes for great and sublime aims to pursue. He will no longer be content with family, country, and the remunerative aspect of his work. He will want wider organisations to create, new paths to blaze, causes to uphold, truths to discover, an ideal to cherish and defend.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I greatly enjoyed the Hawaiian Islands. They are a real little paradise in spite of the influx of Americans who have made it one of their most pleasant 'centers of resort': the soft climate and luxuriance of the tropics; the greenness, the fragrance, the flowers - extraordinary flowers covering the tallest trees and turning them into huge bouquets.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity. This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

At the heart of every being lies creation's dream of a principle that will one day give organic form to its fragmented treasures. God is unity.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it 'Le Milieu Divin,' but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first 'feeling' for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

All I know is that, thanks to a sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme Someone.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world - not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in 'renouncing' one's own self, by which I mean making up one's mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being 'happy' or 'unhappy' in the usual meaning of the words.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Surely the wake left behind by mankind's forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin