75+ Thomas Berry Quotes On Education, Nature And Identity

Thomas Berry was an American cultural historian and Catholic priest. He is best known for his advocacy of the need for a “new story”, a new narrative for humanity that is based on an appreciation of the evolutionary process and an understanding of the interdependence of all life. His work has been influential in the development of the environmental movement, inspiring a generation of activists to think more deeply about the relationship between humans and the natural world. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Thomas Berry on education, nature, identity.

Top 10 Thomas Berry Quotes

1. Teaching children about the natural world should be seen as one of the most important events in their lives.
2. 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.
3. Gardening is an active participation in The deepest mysteries of the universe.
4. We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension.
5. The environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.
6. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being and spiritual integrity.
10. 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.

Thomas Berry Short Quotes

• You cannot have well people on a sick planet.
• The real skill is to raise the sails and to catch the power of the wind as it passes by.
• As humans we are born of the Earth, nourished by the Earth, healed by the Earth.
• Scientists have suddenly become aware of the magic quality of the Earth and the entire universe.
• Because of this erotic bond, the earth becomes luxuriant in its every aspect.
• The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.
• The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
• Survival in any meaningful sense is the key issue of our time

Thomas Berry Quotes About Nature

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

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

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

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

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

We will go into the future as a single sacred community, or we will all perish in the desert. — Thomas Berry

Thomas Berry Quotes About Life

The Great Work - the work of ensuring a just, healthy, beautiful, and sustainably life-giving world for future generations of all species. — Thomas Berry

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

The historical mission of our times is to re-invent the human—at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience. — Thomas Berry

The excitement of life is in the numinous experience wherein we are given to each other in that larger celebration of existence in which all things attain their highest expression, for the universe, by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event. — Thomas Berry

Thomas Berry Quotes About Community

The universe, the solar system, and planet earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being. — Thomas Berry

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

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 is that being in whom the Universe activates, reflects upon, and celebrates itself in conscious self-awareness. — Thomas Berry

The future rests in the religious, political, economic and cultural capacity of humans to establish this larger context in which the particular traditions will find both support and fulfillment in a functional global community. — Thomas Berry

All human professions, institutions, and activities must be integral with the earth as the primary self-nourishing , self-governing and self-fulfilling community. To integrate our human activities within this context is our way into the future. — Thomas Berry

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

Thomas Berry Quotes About Spirituality

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

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

If the religious experience were simply some naive impression of the uninformed it would not have resulted in such intellectual insight, such spiritual exaltation, such spectacular religious ritual, or in the immense volume of song and poetry and literature and dance that humans have produced. — Thomas Berry

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 — Thomas Berry

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

Thomas Berry Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

Once you adopt and communicate a quality policy, stick with it, live it, and protect it. You get only one chance! — Thomas Berry

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. — Thomas Berry

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. — Thomas Berry

Of one thing we can be sure: our own future is inseparable from the larger community that brought us into being and which sustains us in every expression of our human quality of life, in our aesthetic and emotional sensitivities, our intellectual perceptions, our sense of the divine, as well as in our physical nourishment and bodily healing. — Thomas Berry

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

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

Traditions cannot themselves, simply with their own powers, do what needs to be done. These earlier experiences and accomplishments were dealing with other issues, providing guidance for different worlds than the world of the early twenty-first century. — Thomas Berry

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

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 must first have a vision of the future sufficiently entrancing that it will sustain us in the transformation of the human project that is now in process. — Thomas Berry

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 total order of the universe. Reverence will be total or it will not be at all. The universe does not come to us in pieces any more than a human individual stands before us with some part of his/her being. — Thomas Berry

Of all the issues we are concerned with at present, the most basic issue, in my estimation, is that of human-earth relations. — Thomas Berry

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. — Thomas Berry

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 world of intimacy. It takes a universe to make a child both in outer form and inner spirit. It takes a universe to educate a child. A universe to fulfill a child. — Thomas Berry

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

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

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. — Thomas Berry

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

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 functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence. — Thomas Berry

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

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 we face is already an advance. — Thomas Berry

The universe is the primary revelation of the divine, the primary scripture, the primary locus of divine-human communication. — Thomas Berry

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

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

We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable. — Thomas Berry

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

But if a peaceful world is beyond politics it is also beyond religions as these presently exist. A change is needed in every phase of human life. This lies mainly in recognition that the micro phase, the particular or national traditions, must find their context and fulfillment in the macro phase, the global or panhuman phase of human existence. — Thomas Berry

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

Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being. — Thomas Berry

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

In relation to the earth we have been autistic for centuries. Only now have we begun to listen with some attention and with a willingness to respond to the earth's demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence, that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe. — Thomas Berry

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

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. — Thomas Berry

Life Lessons by Thomas Berry

1. Thomas Berry taught us to appreciate the interconnectedness of all living things and to honor the Earth as our home.
2. He showed us that our actions have consequences and that we must work together to create a sustainable future.
3. He reminded us that we have a responsibility to protect the environment and to live in harmony with nature.