Thomas Berry Quotes About Earth

Quotes about: Earth

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

  Thomas Berry

  Destiny, Earth, Progressive

• 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

• 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

• From a large planet of overwhelming magnitude, unlimited resources and endless mystery, the Earth has suddenly become a small planet, thoroughly explored, limited in resources, and reduced in mystery.

  Thomas Berry

  Earth, Mystery, Endless

  Thomas Berry, Thomas Mary Berry (2006). “Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community”, Counterpoint LLC

• For the emergent process, as noted by the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, is neither random nor determined but creative. Just as in human order, creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth.

  Thomas Berry

  Beauty, Creativity, Dark

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.31, Crown

• 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

• The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.

  Thomas Berry

  Moving, Transition, Would Be

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.3, Crown

• As humans we are born of the Earth, nourished by the Earth, healed by the Earth.

  Thomas Berry

  Earth, Born, Healed

  Thomas Berry (2010). “Evening Thoughts”, p.139, Counterpoint

• 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

• If the earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the earth and its inhabitants.

  Thomas Berry

  Kindness, Empathy, Doe

• Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur, but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is also the larger dimension of our being.

  Thomas Berry

  Community, Earth, Dimensions

• So long as we are under the illusion that we know best what is good for the earth and for ourselves, then we will continue our present course, with its devastating consequences on the entire Earth community... We need only listen to what the Earth is telling us... the time has come when we will listen, or we will die.

  Thomas Berry

  Long, Community, Environmental

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

• Our present urgency is to recover a sense of the primacy of the Universe as our fundamental context, and the primacy of the Earth as the matrix from which life has emerged and on which life depends. Recovering this sense is essential to establishing the framework for mutually enhancing human-Earth relations for the flourishing of life on the planet.

  Thomas Berry

  Life, Earth, Essentials

  Thomas Berry (2010). “Evening Thoughts”, p.86, Counterpoint

• What is happening now is of a geological and biological order of magnitude. We are upsetting the entire earth system that, over some billions of years and through an endless sequence of groping, of trials and errors, has produced such a magnificent array of living forms, forms capable of seasonal self-renewal over vast periods of time.

  Thomas Berry

  Nature, Animal, Errors

• We have indeed been out in space, but some are under the illusion that we have been off Earth. In reality humans have never been off Earth. We have always been on a piece of Earth in space. We survive only as long as we can breathe the air of Earth, drink its waters, and be nourished by its foods. There is no indication that as humans we will ever live anywhere else in the universe. Place, too, is continuously being transformed but only within its own possibilities.

  Thomas Berry

  Reality, Air, Space

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.92, Crown

• Yet we can be sure that whatever fictions exist in Wall Street bookkeeping, the earth is a faithful scribe, a faultless calculator, a superb bookkeeper; we will be held responsible for every bit of our economic folly.

  Thomas Berry

  Wall, Integrity, Faithful

• The reduction of the earth to an object simply for human's use/ possession is unthinkable in most traditional cultures... the earth belongs to itself and to all the component members of the community.

  Thomas Berry

  Animal, Community, Culture

• Earth as we know it came into being through its four great components: land, water, air, and life, all interacting in the light and energy of the sun. Although there was a sequence in the formation of the land sphere, the atmosphere, the water sphere, and the life sphere, these have so interacted with one another in the shaping of the Earth that we must somehow think of these as all present to one another and interacting from the beginning.

  Thomas Berry

  Life, Thinking, Light

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.28, Crown

• Even as regards Earth we are more committed to history than to geography, more committed to time than to space. History is endless. Place is limited.

  Thomas Berry

  Space, Historical, Earth

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.92, Crown

• We might sometimes reflect and recall that the purpose of all our science, technology, industry, manufacturing, commerce, and finance is celebration, planetary celebration. This is what moves the stars through the heavens and the earth through its seasons. The final norm of judgment concerning the success or failure of our technologies is the extent to which they enable us to participate more fully in this grand festival.

  Thomas Berry

  Life, Stars, Moving

• We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth's functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself.

  Thomas Berry

  Suicide, Environmental, Earth

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.104, Crown

• We come here because we too feel a responsibility for the human community. To preserve and develop a human quality of life is the common responsibility of us all. It is not fitting that those concerned with the various aspects of the human be alienated from each other. Both you and ourselves represent forces too profound and aim at objectives too significant for either of us to succeed completely without the assistance of the other. The urgency of our work impels us to get on with our common task lest a new period of disaster erupt over the Earth.

  Thomas Berry

  Responsibility, Profound, Community

• 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

• The planet Earth in its present mode of florescence is being devastated. This devastation is being fostered and protected by legal, political and economic establishments that exalt the human community while offering no protection to the non-human modes of being. There is an urgent need for a Jurisprudence (system of governance) that recognizes that the well-being of the integral world community is primary, and that human well-being is derivative - an Earth Jurisprudence.

  Thomas Berry

  Offering, Community, Political

• The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral earth community with all its human and other-than-human components.

  Thomas Berry

  Thinking, Community, Earth

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.105, Crown

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