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 Copy Share Image
Teaching children about the natural world should be seen as one of the most important events in their lives. — Thomas Berry Copy Share Image
All human activities, professions, programs, and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually… — Thomas Berry Copy Share Image
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… — Thomas Berry Copy Share
To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negotiation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth rather than of treaty processes or even of inter-cultural understanding. Simply to recognize the basic nature and dimension of the issues… — Thomas Berry Copy Share
The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the… — Thomas Berry Copy Share Image
During this period (of technological confinement / [and language]) the human mind has been placed in its narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior… — Thomas Berry Copy Share
As humans we are born of the Earth, nourished by the Earth, healed by the Earth. — Thomas Berry Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share
There is an ultimate wildness in all this, for the universe, as existence itself, is a terrifying as well as a benign mode of being. If it grants us amazing powers over much of its functioning we must always remember that any arrogance on our part will ultimately be called to account. The beginning of wisdom in any human activity… — Thomas Berry Copy Share
The Universe is a unity, an interacting and genetically-related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time... The human… — Thomas Berry Copy Share Image
The future rests in the religious, political, economic and cultural capacity of humans to establish this larger context in which the particular traditions will… — Thomas Berry Copy Share Image
We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman, happens to the human. What happens to the outer world, happens to the inner… — Thomas Berry Copy Share Image
