Wendell Berry Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.

Wendell Berry
But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

Wendell Berry
Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.

Wendell Berry
As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.

Wendell Berry
We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

Wendell Berry
Though we pretend otherwise, the unknown increases with the known.

Wendell Berry
Don't pray for the rain to stop; pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.

Wendell Berry
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
There is much good work to be done by every one of us and we must begin to do it.

Wendell Berry
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
If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.

Wendell Berry
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
The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.

Wendell Berry
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
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
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
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
At night make me one with the darkness
In the morning make me one with the light.

Wendell Berry
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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