Thomas Berry Quotes
Teaching children about the natural world should be seen as one of the most important events in their lives.
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.
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.
We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension.
The universe is the primary revelation of the divine, the primary scripture, the primary locus of divine-human communication.
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.
Diversity is the magic. It is the first manifestation, the first beginning of the differentiation of a thing and of simple identity. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
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.
We will go into the future as a single sacred community, or we will all perish in the desert.
Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being and spiritual integrity.
All human activities, professions, programs, and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship.
The Great Work - the work of ensuring a just, healthy, beautiful, and sustainably life-giving world for future generations of all species.
In our totality we are born of the Earth. Our spirituality itself is earth-derived... If there is no spirituality in the earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves
The real skill is to raise the sails and to catch the power of the wind as it passes by.
Once you adopt and communicate a quality policy, stick with it, live it, and protect it. You get only one chance!
Everything is integral and interacts with everything else. This means that nothing is itself without everything else. There is a commonality, an integrity, an intimacy of the universe with itself.
We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman, happens to the human. What happens to the outer world, happens to the inner world.
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.
We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.
Scientists have suddenly become aware of the magic quality of the Earth and the entire universe.
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.
The success or failure of any historical age is the extent to which those living at that time have fulfilled the special role that history has imposed upon them.
The earth will solve its problems, and possibly our own, if we will let the earth function in its own ways. We need only listen to what the earth is telling us.
It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself.
Of all the issues we are concerned with at present, the most basic issue, in my estimation, is that of human-earth relations.
In these writings, and in all my teaching work, I continue to ask the question, “What about the children?
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.
