Quote

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

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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
Earth
Period
Human
Carry
Humans
Planet
Devastation
Great
Periods
Mutually
Work
Planets
Millennium
Would
Move
Beneficial
Present
Transition
Moving
Manner

More quotes by 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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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
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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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The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
Thomas Berry
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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
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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
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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.
Thomas Berry
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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
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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 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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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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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.
Thomas Berry
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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.
Thomas Berry
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So long as we are under the illusion that we know best what is good for the earth and for ourselves, then we will continue our present course, with its devastating consequences on the entire Earth community... We need only listen to what the Earth is telling us... the time has come when we will listen, or we will die.
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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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
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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
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The real skill is to raise the sails and to catch the power of the wind as it passes by.
Thomas Berry
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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.
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