Quote

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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Thomas Berry
Age: 94 †
Born: 1914
Born: November 9
Died: 2009
Died: June 1
Author
Cultural Historian
Environmentalist
Theologian
Writer
Greensboro
North Carolina
Loses
Butterflies
Stars
Butterfly
Spiritual
Forest
Song
Birds
Experience
Forests
Night
Souls
Soul
Bird
Lose

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Of all the issues we are concerned with at present, the most basic issue, in my estimation, is that of human-earth relations.
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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.
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The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being and spiritual integrity.
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We will go into the future as a single sacred community, or we will all perish in the desert.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As humans we are born of the Earth, nourished by the Earth, healed by the Earth.
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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.
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The real skill is to raise the sails and to catch the power of the wind as it passes by.
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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.
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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.
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The universe is the primary revelation of the divine, the primary scripture, the primary locus of divine-human communication.
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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.
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