Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

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

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world... life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere.

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of oneself to others.

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

Love alone can unite living beings so as to complete and fulfill them... for it alone joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth.

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The sick man in his apparent inactivity has a very grand human task to fulfil. He must of course never cease to aim at his own cure and recovery. Also he must of course use all the strength that remains to him for the different kinds of sometimes extremely productive work that are within his powers. Christian resignation, in fact, is just the opposite of giving up. Once he has resolved to combat his sickness in this way, the sick man must realize that in proportion to his sickness he has a special function to perform, in which no one can replace him: the task of co-operating in the transformation (one might say conversion) of human suffering.

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Death has been treated too much as a subject for melancholy reflection, or as an occasion for self-discipline, or as a rather hazy theological entity. . . . What we have to do is to see it in its true context, see it as an active reality, as one more phase, in a world and a "becoming" that are those of our own experience.

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin