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The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
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
Inspiring
Subjects
Objects
Universe
Communion
Collection
Collections
Environmental
More quotes by Thomas Berry
The real skill is to raise the sails and to catch the power of the wind as it passes by.
Thomas Berry
Once you adopt and communicate a quality policy, stick with it, live it, and protect it. You get only one chance!
Thomas Berry
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.
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
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
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.
Thomas Berry
We will go into the future as a single sacred community, or we will all perish in the desert.
Thomas Berry
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
What is clear is that the earth is mandating that the human community assume a responsibility never assigned to any previous generation...Our task at this critical moment is to awaken the energies needed to create the new world and to evoke a universal communion of all parts of life.
Thomas Berry
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
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
We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable.
Thomas Berry
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.
Thomas Berry
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
Of one thing we can be sure: our own future is inseparable from the larger community that brought us into being and which sustains us in every expression of our human quality of life, in our aesthetic and emotional sensitivities, our intellectual perceptions, our sense of the divine, as well as in our physical nourishment and bodily healing.
Thomas Berry
The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
Thomas Berry
What does the Earth Desire? I will put it in just a few short sentences... To be admired in her loveliness, To be tasted in her delicious fruits, To be listened to in her teaching, To be endured in the severity of her discipline, To be cared for as a maternal source from whence we come, a destiny to which we return. It's very simple.
Thomas Berry
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.
Thomas Berry
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.
Thomas Berry
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