Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Men Quotations

Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge.

A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows.

All the communions of a life-time are one communion.All the communions of all men now living are one communion.All the communions of all men, present, past and future, are one communion.

Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But ... A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.

Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function-the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.

From an evolutionary point of view, man has stopped moving, if he ever did move.

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

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

Individual human beings are so subtly developed through the centuries that it is strictly impermissible to compare any two men who are not contemporaries-that is to say are taken from two quite different times.

We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.

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.

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

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