Thomas Berry Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Thomas Berry's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Author Thomas Berry's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 2 quotes on this page collected since November 9, 1914! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.

  • Survival in any meaningful sense is the key issue of our time

  • 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.

    Dream   Future   Artist  
    Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.10, 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.

  • The universe is the primary revelation of the divine, the primary scripture, the primary locus of divine-human communication.

  • 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.

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

    Quality   Sticks   Chance  
  • 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.

    Self   Community   Earth  
  • 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.

    Dream   Mean   Reflection  
    Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.159, Crown
  • 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.'

    Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stanley, David Loy, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim (2013). “Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth”, p.59, The Golden Sufi Center
  • 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.

    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
  • 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.

    Nature   Animal   Errors  
  • We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.

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

    Thomas Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker (2009). “The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-first Century”, p.145, Columbia University Press
  • As humans we are born of the Earth, nourished by the Earth, healed by the Earth.

    Earth   Born   Healed  
    Thomas Berry (2010). “Evening Thoughts”, p.139, Counterpoint
  • 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 (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.31, Crown
  • 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.

  • 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 that enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young: to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea. This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist and the power of the shaman.

    Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.51, Crown
  • 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.

    Peace   Lying   World  
    Thomas Berry, Thomas Mary Berry (2006). “Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community”, Counterpoint LLC
  • Scientists have suddenly become aware of the magic quality of the Earth and the entire universe.

    Magic   Quality   Earth  
  • 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 become available to support the human venture. These new energies find expression and support in celebration. For in the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration. It is all an exuberant expression of existence itself.

    Time   Self   Expression  
  • There is a spiritual capacity in carbon as there is a carbon component functioning in our highest spiritual experience. If some scientists consider that all this is merely a material process, then what they call matter, I call mind, soul, spirit, or consciousness. Possibly it is a question of terminology, since scientists too on occasion use terms that express awe and mystery. Most often, perhaps, they use the expression that some of the natural forms they encounter seem to be "telling them something."

    Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.25, 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.

  • We need merely understand that the evolutionary process is neither random nor determined but creative. It follows the general pattern of all creativity. While there is no way of fully understanding the origin moment of the universe we can appreciate the direction of evolution in its larger arc of development as moving from lesser to great complexity in structure and from lesser to greater modes of consciousness. We can also understand the governing principles of evolution in terms of its three movements toward differentiation, inner spontaneity, and comprehensive bonding.

  • 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.

    Life   Earth   Essentials  
    Thomas Berry (2010). “Evening Thoughts”, p.86, Counterpoint
  • 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.

    Spiritual   Song   Stars  
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