Quotes from Thomas Berry

Teaching children about the natural world should be seen as one of the most important events in their lives.

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

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.

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 real skill is to raise the sails and to catch the power of the wind as it passes by.

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.

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.

Gardening is an active participation in The deepest mysteries of the universe.

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

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.

The environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.

Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being and spiritual integrity.

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

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 destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.

We might summarize our present human situation by the simple statement: that in the 20th century, the glory of the human has become the desolation of the Earth and now the desolation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the human. From here on, the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing human/Earth relationship.

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

A degraded habitat will produce degraded humans. If there is to be any true progress, then the entire life community must progress.

O]ur human economy is derivative from the Earth economy. To glory in a rising Gross Domestic Product with an irreversibly declining Earth Product is an economic absurdity.

We must, however, reflect on what is happening. It is an urgent matter, especially for those of us who still live in a meaningful, even a numinous, earth community. We have not spoken. Nor even have we seen clearly what is happening. The issue goes far beyond economics, or commerce, or poetics, or an evening of pleasantries as we look out over a scenic view. Something is happening beyond all this. We are losing splendind and intimate modes of divine presence. We are, perhaps, losing ourselves.

The Earth is so integral in the unity of its functioning that every aspect of the Earth is affected by what happens to any component member of the community. Because of its organic quality, Earth cannot survive in fragments….The integral functioning of the planet must be preserved.

For people, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. ... The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.

Until technologists learn reverence for the earth, there will be no possibility of bringing a healing or a new creative age to the earth.