Thomas Berry Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

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
We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension.

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

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