Wendell Berry Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'

Wendell Berry
Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

Wendell Berry
If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.

Wendell Berry
I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.

Wendell Berry
At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.

Wendell Berry
All right, every day ain't going to be the best day of your life, don't worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.

Wendell Berry
This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

Wendell Berry
We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us... We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

Wendell Berry
Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time.

Wendell Berry
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