Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry Quotes
321 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Don't pray for the rain to stop; pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
It is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
There is much good work to be done by every one of us and we must begin to do it.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
You've got to reach towards a better language, and you're not going to make it up from scratch; you've got to reach back into the tradition. Western tradition is not as impoverished as a lot of people would like to think, but you'd have to go back before the industrial revolution; you may have to go back farther than that. Of course, the Bible has a perfectly adequate language, but it's suffered a lot of thoughtless wear.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, "to the least of these my brethren." Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
Man... is the center of the universe only in the sense that wherever he is it seems to him that he is at the center of his own horizon; the truth is that he is only a part of a vast complex of life, on the totality and the order of which he is blandly dependent.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
At night make me one with the darkness
In the morning make me one with the light.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
Willing to die you give up your will; keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable inquiries, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy-which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something that they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue. We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do.
Wendell Berry
Source
Report...
Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.
Wendell Berry
1
...
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Quote of the day
About one-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Robert F. Kennedy
Wendell Berry
Born:
August 5, 1934
(age 89)
Bio:
Wendell E. Berry is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays.
Known for:
Hannah Coulter (2004)
Jayber Crow (2000)
That distant land (2002)
A place on earth (1967)
What are people for? (1991)
Most used words:
love
people
live
life
food
time
free
economy
local
work
violence
war
place
living
power
Wendell Berry on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Wendell Berry Quotes
Wendell Berry Short Quotes
American Author Quotes
Author Quotes
20th-century Author Quotes
Related People
Wes Jackson
American Botanist
Wallace Stegner
American Historian
Gary Snyder
American Poet
Edward Abbey
American Essayist
Annie Dillard
American Poet
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes