All quotes from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s

This coefficient of centro-complexity (or, which comes to the same thing, of consciousness) is the true absolute measure of being in the beings that surround us. That, and that alone, can be the basis for a truly natural classification of the elements of the universe.

What can be distinguished on the horizon is nothing but, and nothing less than, a continual increase of organization and of centricity—and this time on the scale not of the particle but of the sphere: the accelerated impetus of an earth in which preoccupation with production for the sake of well-being will have given way to the passion for the discovery for the sake of fuller being—the super-personalization of a super-humanity that has become super-conscious of itself in the increasing light of Omega.

Only love, by virtue of its specific and unique power of ‘personalizing complexes,’ can achieve the miracle of super-personalizing man through and by means of the forces of collectivization.

Strictly speaking, if matter is defined as ‘something with no vestige of consciousness or spontaneity,’ it does not exist. Even in pre-living particles, we saw, we must conceive some sort of curvature which prefigures and initiates the appearance of freedom and a ‘within.’

There is nothing in the universe except spirit, in different states or degrees of organization and plurality.

With centro-complexity dealing not simply, now, with grains of thought upon a single planet but with as many noospheres as there will be thinking planets in the firmament, the process of personalization takes on a decisively cosmic aspect. It is almost more than our minds can dare to face.