Thomas Berry Quotes

72 quotes in 1280 categories

• Teaching children about the natural world should be seen as one of the most important events in their lives.
• We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Every being has its own interior, its self, its mystery, its numinous aspect. To deprive any being of this sacred quality is to disrupt the…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• The child awakens to a universe. The mind of the child to a world of meaning. Imagination to a world of beauty. Emotions to a…
• 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…
• Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this…
• As in creating some significant work the artist first experiences something akin to dream awareness that becomes clarified in the creative process itself, so we…
• The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
• 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.…
• Wildness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneities of any being. It is that wellspring of creativity whence comes the instinctive activities…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

Browse Thomas Berry Quotes by Category