Quotes by Teilhard de Chardin

“It doesnt matter if the water is cold or warm if youre going to have to wade through it anyway”

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

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats ...”

“I belive that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution”

“The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.”

Joy is the most infallible sign of the Presence of God.

Someday after we have mastered the winds the waves the tide and gravity we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.