Pierre De Chardin Quotes

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

Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.

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.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.

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

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.

You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned

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

Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.

Research is the highest form of adoration

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.

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

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

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.

The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

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

In the end, only the truth will survive.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form. . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts.

It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice.

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.

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

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.

I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis" -Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man.

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

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others that have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe.

In no case does the energy required for synthesis appear to be provided by an influx of fresh capital, but by expenditure.

The quintessential good and beauty in life is what each has to offer to others valuing the gesture ourselves into confluence with the Word of God.

(Evolution) 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. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

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.

French philosopher-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

evolutionary phenomena (of course including the phenomenon known as man) are processus, they can never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or mainly in terms of their origins: they must be defined by their direction,

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

As Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” He was right. If we recognize the soul lesson, we can grow beyond suffering, and there is no stress in this state of understanding.

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

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

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.

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

for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of fact never static:

He [Pierre Teilhard de Chardin] was thrilled with the idea that through work in the world human beings were participating in the ongoing extension and consecration of God's creation.

For brief as water falling will be death, and brief as flower falling, or leaf, brief as the taking, and the giving, breath; thus natural, thus brief, my love, is grief. —CONRAD AIKEN 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

in the course of the growth of research; so that, when they reach the end of their analyses they cannot tell with any certainty whether the structure they have reached is the essence of the matter they are studying, or the reflection of their own thought.

It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty." [Written from Peking, October 1945, on the eve of departure, after having been stuck there since the war began.]

There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a “tale told by an idiot,” a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens—the “evolutionary goof.” Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.” In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all.

You are not a human being having a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being having a human experience.

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

man's evolution was unique in showing the dominance of convergence over divergence:

Why does our world feel so very crazy? Why do mental and emotional illnesses emerge more rapidly than we can educate psychiatrists, psychologists, addiction specialists, and mental health counselors to diagnose and treat them? We are marinating in the soup of collective madness, cruelty, selfishness, and lies, the soup of spiritual toxicity.

Since once again, Lord - though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia - I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the Real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world. Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labour. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits. My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those whom the light is now awakening to the new day . . . Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say again the words: ‘This is my Body’. And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: ‘This is my Blood’.

There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Why

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. The day will come when, after mastering the ether, the winds, the tides, gravity, we shall master the energies of love, for God. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have made fire his servant.

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

El pasado me ha revelado la estructura del futuro

Or you agree with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin when he said, ‘We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

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 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 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. And “Greater

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.

I learned that after the first English translation of The Divine Comedy, the word did not resurface in the language until the mid-twentieth century, in the work of the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness . . . 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

(“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. And “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends”—The Gospel According to Saint John.)

Ultimately, we are much more addicted than the junkie because we are responsible for not only our own demise, but the breakdown of the entire natural world. There is no other appropriate response to a situation this grave, this utterly overwhelming, than powerlessness. It has taken countless generations to arrive in this predicament; a solution cannot arise overnight. It will take work. It will take time.

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.

...The very fact of our becoming aware of this profound ordering of things will enable human collectivization to pass beyond the enforced phase, where it now is, into the free phase: that in which (men having at last understood that they are inseparably joined elements of a converging Whole, and having learnt in consequence to love the preordained forces that unite them) a natural union of affinity and sympathy will supersede the forces of compulsion.

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.

By upbringing and intellectual training, I belong to the “children of heaven”; but by temperament, and by my professional studies, I am a “child of the earth”. Situated thus by life at the heart of two worlds with whose theory, idiom and feelings intimate experience has made me familiar, I have not erected any watertight bulkhead inside myself. On the contrary, I have allowed two apparently conflicting influences full freedom to react upon one another deep within me. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history. ... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20... This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued. Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are are spiritual beings immersed in a spiritual experience

Third Covenant “monosacredness” is not a break with the earlier covenants; it transcends and includes them all.

So what, simply put, is the Third Covenant? It is the recalibration, the reawakening of that which is truly human, truly holy. It is truly catholic, kata-holos (Greek “according to the whole”), truly universal, sacred, and unitive. It is made manifest by a unitive noosphere, one that embraces the Monosacred present in all Abrahamic, Indigenous, Chinese, Indian, and any and all other cultures. It embraces the whole biosphere, the whole planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe. It both precedes and succeeds space and time.

Even greater shifts will be needed if we are to finally understand that we cannot continue to live on this planet as if it is nothing more than a collection of resources for us to exploit. A greater shift will be needed if we are to realize that no one religious tradition can lay claim to absolute “truth” and we must instead learn from each other in a mutually enhancing quest for conscious contact with the Sacred.

In these writings, and in all my teaching work, I continue to ask the question, “What about the children?

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 (sic) will have discovered fire.

Reflecting on this, Albert LaChance recognized an opportunity—what if the work he and so many others found so fruitful in the 12-Step recovery programs could be expanded to an ecological, a global, or even a cosmic level?

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

Creo que el Universo es una Evolución. Creo que la Evolución va hacia el Espíritu. Creo que el Espíritu se realiza en algo personal. Creo que lo Personal supremo es el Cristo Universal

harnessing the space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies oflove. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. -PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, S.J, TOWARD THE FUTURE

Kierkegaard wrote of “eternal consciousness”; the French sociologist Émile Durkheim of “collective consciousness”; the British writer H. G. Wells of a “world brain”; the French philosopher Edouard Le Roy of the “noosphere”—which the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called a “new skin” on the earth.

And here I am thinking of those astonishing electronic machines . . . by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald . . . astonishing advances.” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything to ever prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.

Abstract theology, sacramentalism whose standard was quantity not quality and over-refined piety. The guidance provided by clergy to the flock is being confined to a little artificial world of ritualism, of religious practices and pious extravaganzas, which is completely cut off from the true current of reality.

We are not physical creatures having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual creatures having a physical experience.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things . . . as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Both Christian traditionalism and current scientific naturalism foster ways of looking at the world that have the effect of “clipping the wings of hope,” as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would have put it. Hope needs a lofty horizon, one that reaches beyond personal existence, human history, and the universe itself.

Both detachment and attachment were seen by Teilhard de Chardin as two sides of the same coin.