Thomas Berry Quotes

Quotes about:

• The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.

  Thomas Berry

  Community, Damage, World

  139 Copy quote

• The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightening and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees, ~~ all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.

  Thomas Berry

  Nature, Stars, Flower

  "A Language Older Than Words". Book by Derrick Jensen (p. 361), 2000.

  118 Copy quote

• We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual 'autism.'

  Thomas Berry

  Spiritual, Stars, Talking

  Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stanley, David Loy, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim (2013). “Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth”, p.59, The Golden Sufi Center

  101 Copy quote

• The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.

  Thomas Berry

  World, Language, Natural

  Thomas Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker (2009). “The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-first Century”, p.145, Columbia University Press

  111 Copy quote

• We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can't see the stars at night.

  Thomas Berry

  Spiritual, Song, Stars

  109 Copy quote

• In reality, there is a single integral community of the Earth that includes all its component members whether human or other than human. In this community every being has its own role to fulfill, its own dignity, its own inner spontaneity. Every being has its own voice. Every being declares itself to the entire universe. Every being enters into communion with other beings.
  
  In every phase of our imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional lives we are profoundly dependent on this larger context of the surrounding world.

  Thomas Berry

  Life, Reality, Emotional

  117 Copy quote

• What does the Earth Desire? I will put it in just a few short sentences... To be admired in her loveliness, To be tasted in her delicious fruits, To be listened to in her teaching, To be endured in the severity of her discipline, To be cared for as a maternal source from whence we come, a destiny to which we return. It's very simple.

  Thomas Berry

  Teaching, Simple, Destiny

  70 Copy quote

• The environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.

  Thomas Berry

  Spiritual, Environmental, Crisis

  55 Copy quote

• Teaching children about the natural world should be seen as one of the most important events in their lives.

  Thomas Berry

  Nature, Children, Teaching

  Thomas Berry, Thomas Mary Berry (1996). “Creative Energy: Bearing Witness for the Earth”, Random House (NY)

  120 Copy quote

• If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.

  Thomas Berry

  Spiritual, Stars, Night

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.200, Crown

  12 Copy quote

• We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.

  Thomas Berry

  Nature, World, Natural

  7 Copy quote

• We need to move: from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to a spirituality of intimacy with the natural world from a spirituality of the divine as revealed in words to a spirituality of the divine as revealed in the visible world about us.

  Thomas Berry

  Moving, Needs, World

  74 Copy quote

• It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.

  Thomas Berry

  Inspiring, Stories, Fit

  Thomas Berry, Thomas Mary Berry (1996). “Creative Energy: Bearing Witness for the Earth”, Random House (NY)

  76 Copy quote

• The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

  Thomas Berry

  Inspiring, Environmental, Communion

  Thomas Berry (2010). “Evening Thoughts”, p.17, Counterpoint

  61 Copy quote

• The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.

  Thomas Berry

  Destiny, Earth, Progressive

  86 Copy quote

• Gardening is an active participation in The deepest mysteries of the universe.

  Thomas Berry

  Garden, Religion, Spirit

  78 Copy quote

• You cannot have well people on a sick planet.

  Thomas Berry

  People, Sick, Planets

  16 Copy quote

• The universe must be experienced as the Great Self. Each is fulfilled in the other: the Great Self is fulfilled in the individual self, the individual self is fulfilled in the Great Self. Alienation is overcome as soon as we experience this surge of energy from the source that has brought the universe through the centuries. New fields of energy become available to support the human venture. These new energies find expression and support in celebration. For in the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration. It is all an exuberant expression of existence itself.

  Thomas Berry

  Time, Self, Expression

  88 Copy quote

• The human venture depends absolutely on this quality of awe and reverence and joy in the Earth and all that lives and grows upon the Earth. As soon as we isolate ourselves from these currents of life and from the profound mood that these engender within us, then our basic life-satisfactions are diminished. None of our machine-made products, none of our computer-based achievements can evoke that total commitment to life.

  Thomas Berry

  Growing Up, Commitment, Profound

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.166, Crown

  37 Copy quote

• We can break the mountains apart; we can drain the rivers and flood the valleys. We can turn the most luxuriant forests into throw-away paper products. We can tear apart the great grass cover of the western plains and pour toxic chemicals into the soil and pesticides onto the fields until the soil is dead and blows away in the wind. We can pollute the air with acids, the rivers with sewage, the seas with oil - all this in a kind of intoxication with our power for devastation at an order of magnitude beyond all reckoning.

  Thomas Berry

  Blow, Oil, Rivers

  73 Copy quote

• What is clear is that the earth is mandating that the human community assume a responsibility never assigned to any previous generation...Our task at this critical moment is to awaken the energies needed to create the new world and to evoke a universal communion of all parts of life.

  Thomas Berry

  Responsibility, Community, Energy

  17 Copy quote

• The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

  Thomas Berry

  Reality, Wind, Bird

  Thomas Berry, Thomas Mary Berry, Thomas E. Clarke, Anne Lonergan (1991). “Befriending the Earth: A Theology of Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth”, Mystic, Conn. : Twenty-Third Publications

  48 Copy quote

• The time has come to lower our voices, to cease imposing our mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the earth, to resist the impulse to control, to command, to force, to oppress, and to begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends.

  Thomas Berry

  Nature, Animal, Voice

  19 Copy quote

• The world of life, of spontaneity, the world of dawn and sunset and starlight, the world of soil and sunshine, of meadow and woodland, of hickory and oak and maple and hemlock and pineland forests, of wildlife dwelling around us, of the river and its wellbeing--all of this [is] the integral community in which we live.

  Thomas Berry

  Nature, Sunset, Sunshine

  47 Copy quote

• Our difficulty is that we have become autistic. We no longer listen to what the Earth, its landscape, its atmospheric phenomena and all its living forms, its mountains and valleys, the rain, the wind, and all the flora and fauna of the planet are telling us.

  Thomas Berry

  Rain, Wind, Listening

  25 Copy quote

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