Wendell Berry Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing and making

Wendell Berry
We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and for each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make. The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependant on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do.

Wendell Berry
Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don't buy anything new.

Wendell Berry
When you have large-scale legitimated violence in a place that is divided as profoundly and bitterly as Kentucky was, the legitimate violence can cause illegitimate violence, a terrible local heartlessness and cruelty that feeds on itself and goes on and on.

Wendell Berry
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

Wendell Berry
Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health -- and create profitable diseases and dependencies -- by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

Wendell Berry
No individual life is an end in itself. One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can live fully only by making ourselves answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time.

Wendell Berry
When humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals: Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.

Wendell Berry
We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.

Wendell Berry
I dream of a quiet man / who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows / where the rarest wildflowers / are blooming, and who goes, / and finds that he is smiling / not by his own will.

Wendell Berry
Without a complex knowledge of one's place and without the faithfulness to one's place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or "in" group.

Wendell Berry
But we can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present. For the amelioration of the future condition of our kind we must look, not to the wealth or the genius of the coming generations, but to the quality of the disciplines and attitudes that we are preparing now for their use.

Wendell Berry
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One's inner voices become audible... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.

Wendell Berry
Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread,

Wendell Berry
Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.

Wendell Berry
When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.

Wendell Berry
The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.

Wendell Berry
However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always found to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.

Wendell Berry
That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.

Wendell Berry
A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. The realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has always conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done.

Wendell Berry
The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.

Wendell Berry