Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music.

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.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

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

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’

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.

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

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

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

The paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude – all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.