Wendell Berry Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

It is better to buy from a small, privately owned local store than from a chain store. It is better to buy a good product than a bad one. Do not buy anything you don't need. Do as much as you can for yourself. If you cannot do something for yourself, see if you have a neighbor who can do it for you. Do everything you can to see that your money stays as long as possible in the local community.

Wendell Berry
In this state of total consumerism-which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves-all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.

Wendell Berry
We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

Wendell Berry
All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows....

Wendell Berry
You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.

Wendell Berry
But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free.

Wendell Berry
There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.

Wendell Berry
It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

Wendell Berry
The people who benefit from this state of affairs have been at pains to convince us that the agricultural practices and policies that have almost annihilated the farming population have greatly benefited the population of food consumers. But more and more consumers are now becoming aware that our supposed abundance of cheap and healthful food is to a considerable extent illusory.

Wendell Berry
It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'

Wendell Berry
We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.

Wendell Berry
But in fact as knowledge expands globally it is being lost locally. This is the paramount truth of the modern history of rural places everywhere in the world. And it is the gravest problem of land use: Modern humans typically are using places whose nature they have never known and whose history they have forgotten; thus ignorant, they almost necessarily abuse what they use.

Wendell Berry
Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.

Wendell Berry
What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.

Wendell Berry
You're making the grant of affection, forbearance, mercy, out of your own experience and, of course, out of cultural tradition. You're saying, to use the well-worn analogy, if I love my children, that puts me under obligation to assume that other people love theirs.

Wendell Berry
The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.

Wendell Berry
In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

Wendell Berry
We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

Wendell Berry
To me, an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts.

Wendell Berry
The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.

Wendell Berry
You cannot save the land apart from the people, or the people apart from the land.

Wendell Berry
You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

Wendell Berry
This wilderness, the universe, is somewhat hospitable to us, but it is also absolutely dangerous to us (it is going to kill us, sooner or later), and we are absolutely dependent upon it.

Wendell Berry
It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.

Wendell Berry
But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life.

Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.

Wendell Berry
There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.

Wendell Berry
The name of our proper connection to the earth is 'good work,' for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing.

Wendell Berry
A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.

Wendell Berry
There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.

Wendell Berry