251 Quotes by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

Humankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization.

Energy is the measure of that which passes from one atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression of structure.

Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.

As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal".

The machine not only does it relieve us mechanically of a crushing weight of physical and mental labor; but by the miraculous enhancing of our senses, through its powers of enlargement, penetration and exact measurement, it constantly increases the scope and clarity of our perceptions. It fulfills the dream of all living creatures by satisfying our instinctive craving for the maximum of consciousness with a minimum of effort! Having embarked upon so profitable a path, how can Mankind fail to pursue it?

This it the greatest success I can dream of for my life: to have spread a new vision of the world.

Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him.

The human person is the sum total of a 15 billion year chain of unbroken evolution now thinking about itself