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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(1 May 1881 - 10 Apr 1955)
French philosopher and paleontologist who regarded evolution as not just a physical fact, but also a spiritual truth.
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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes on Discovery (4 quotes)
>> Click for 28 Science Quotes by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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>> Click for 28 Science Quotes by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
>> Click for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes on | Energy | Evolution | Matter | Time | Universe | World |
Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow. ... The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself....Man is not the center of the universe as once we thought in our simplicity, but something much more wonderful—the arrow pointing the way to the final unification of the world in terms of life. Man alone constitutes the last-born, the freshest, the most complicated, the most subtle of all the successive layers of life. ... The universe has always been in motion and at this moment continues to be in motion. But will it still be in motion tomorrow? ... What makes the world in which we live specifically modern is our discovery in it and around it of evolution. ... Thus in all probability, between our modern earth and the ultimate earth, there stretches an immense period, characterized not by a slowing-down but a speeding up and by the definitive florescence of the forces of evolution along the line of the human shoot.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In The Phenomenon of Man (1975), pp 218, 220, 223, 227, 228, 277.
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.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In Teilhard de Chardin and Bernard Wall (trans.), The Phenomenon of Man (1959, 2008), 43. Originally published in French as Le Phénomene Humain (1955).
The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
From 'The Evolution of Chastity' (Feb 1934), as translated by René Hague in Toward the Future (1975), 86-87.
This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. In its own way, matter obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of “complexification.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In Teilhard de Chardin and Bernard Wall (trans.), The Phenomenon of Man (1959, 2008), 48. Originally published in French as Le Phénomene Humain (1955).
See also:
- 1 May - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Teilhard de Chardin's birth.