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

Thomas Berry

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Thomas Berry
Age: 94 †
Born: 1914
Born: November 9
Died: 2009
Died: June 1
Author
Cultural Historian
Environmentalist
Theologian
Writer
Greensboro
North Carolina
Community
Future
Nature
Perish
Desert
Sacred
Single

More quotes by Thomas Berry

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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
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The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
Thomas Berry
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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As humans we are born of the Earth, nourished by the Earth, healed by the Earth.
Thomas Berry
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The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
Thomas Berry
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Once you adopt and communicate a quality policy, stick with it, live it, and protect it. You get only one chance!
Thomas Berry
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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.
Thomas Berry
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Thomas Berry
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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