Richard Rohr Quotes

We should honor Mother Earth with gratitude; otherwise our spirituality may become hypocritical.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics..

Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it.

I realize the answer is not to create wilderness and walk away.

One who neglects or disregards the existence of earth, air, fire, water and vegetation disregards his own existence which is entwined with them.

Right now, we don't have a very good relation with creation.

Not all is doom and gloom. We are beginning to understand the natural world and are gaining a reverence for life - all life.

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.

Our challenge for the future is that we realize we are very much a part of the earth's ecosystem, and we must learn to respect and live according to the basic biological laws of nature.

Unless we connect directly with the earth, we will not have the faintest clue why we should save it…. Only if we understand the beauty of nature will we love it, and only if we become alerted to learn about the planet's disease processes can we decide to live our lives with a proper sense of ecological responsibility.

Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

The mistake is to think that clever technology can solve everything, but it can't solve our relationship with nature, which is where I think it's gone wrong in that we have somehow abandoned our proper connection with nature.

I see a future in which nature gives us a helping hand. Instead of destroying the natural world, why can't we use it to solve the kinds of problems that we are facing?

We have an obligation to live in harmony with creation, with our capital... with God's creation. And we need to administer and work that very carefully.

The environment, what surrounds you, is so alive and delightful and complex.

The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish.

If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

We have to understand in value what the services of nature are so that we can understand that degrading them is an irreplaceable resource that no amount of money or human ingenuity can replace.

Your connections with other people are important, our connection to the earth.

It's not that hard to imagine the natural world recovering it's health in our absence: it's more difficult, and more necessary, to imagine it recovering its health in our presence.

Do no dishonour to the earth least you dishonour the spirit of man.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.