Wendell Berry Quotes

#1. To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Wendell Berry

#2. But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that (as Burley Coulter used to say) we've all got to go through enough to kill us.

Wendell Berry

#3. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

Wendell Berry

#4. This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me.

Wendell Berry

#5. An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.

Wendell Berry

#6. Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

Wendell Berry

#7. Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.

Wendell Berry

#8. What can't be helped must be endured.

Wendell Berry

#9. Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.

Wendell Berry

#10. It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.

Wendell Berry

#11. Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
(pg.99, "The Body and the Earth")

Wendell Berry

#12. What would be the point of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded and poisoned, or personally free in a world entirely controlled by the government or enlightened by television?

Wendell Berry

#13. I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.

Wendell Berry

#14. 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

#15. To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

Wendell Berry

#16. In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree. (pg. 123, The Body and the Earth)

Wendell Berry

#17. If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

Wendell Berry

#18. An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

Wendell Berry

#19. The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten.

Wendell Berry

#20. Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money - a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One's

Wendell Berry

#21. He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.

Wendell Berry

#22. We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.

Wendell Berry

#23. 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

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

Wendell Berry

#25. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

Wendell Berry

#26. If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.

Wendell Berry

#27. These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.

Wendell Berry

#28. Dance,' they told me, and I stood still,
and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.
'Pray,' they said, and I laughed,
covering myself in the earth's brightnesses,
and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel,
and prayed like an orphan.

Wendell Berry

#29. Those who say Islam is a warlike religion must ask if Christianity has been as well.

Wendell Berry

#30. We need to confront honestly the issue of scale ... You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

Wendell Berry

#31. Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.

Wendell Berry

#32. 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

#33. The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.

Wendell Berry

#34. But a man with a machine and inadequate culture - such as I was when I made my pond - is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

Wendell Berry

#35. If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?

Wendell Berry

#36. I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature.

Wendell Berry

#37. It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

Wendell Berry

#38. The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves ...

Wendell Berry

#39. 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

#40. We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I'm complicit in the things that I'm trying to oppose.

Wendell Berry

#41. The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

Wendell Berry

#42. It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

Wendell Berry

#43. I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it's environment. The environment is in you. It's passing through you. You're breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.

Wendell Berry

#44. Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.

Wendell Berry

#45. It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.

Wendell Berry

#46. 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

#47. The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.

Wendell Berry

#48. The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer ... the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire; ...

Wendell Berry

#49. The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.

Wendell Berry

#50. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

Wendell Berry

#51. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Wendell Berry

#52. Be joyful because it is humanly possible.

Wendell Berry

#53. Time doesn't stop. Your life doesn't stop and wait until you get ready to start living it.

Wendell Berry

#54. We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

Wendell Berry

#55. Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone.

Wendell Berry

#56. People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.

Wendell Berry

#57. It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

Wendell Berry

#58. A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.

Wendell Berry

#59. When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.

Wendell Berry

#60. 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

#61. The highly industrialized factory farm is entirely dependent on "purchased inputs." The agrarian farm, well integrated into the natural systems that support it, runs to an economically significant extent on resources and supplies that are free. It

Wendell Berry

#62. And we pray, not for new
earth or heaven, but to be quiet
in heart, and in eye clear.
What we need is here.

Wendell Berry

#63. Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)

Wendell Berry

#64. You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.

Wendell Berry

#65. The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.

Wendell Berry

#66. I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

Wendell Berry

#67. Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

Wendell Berry

#68. There comes ... a longing never to travel again except on foot.

Wendell Berry

#69. 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

#70. I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead.

Wendell Berry

#71. It's the impeded stream that sings

Wendell Berry

#72. Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?

Wendell Berry

#73. We live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory.

Wendell Berry

#74. Why should conservationists have a positive interest in ... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

Wendell Berry

#75. The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Wendell Berry

#76. Today, local economies are being destroyed by the pluralistic, displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.

Wendell Berry

#77. We see how everything - the whole world - is belittled by the idea that all creation is moving or ought to move toward an end that some body, some human body, has thought up.

Wendell Berry

#78. If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.

Wendell Berry

#79. Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.

Wendell Berry

#80. The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

Wendell Berry

#81. You have taken me and quieted me.
You have been such light to me that others have been your shadows.
You come near me with the nearness of sleep.

--"Marriage", Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry

#82. Specialization is the great evil of civilization.

Wendell Berry

#83. It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

Wendell Berry

#84. The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.

Wendell Berry

#85. The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth.

Wendell Berry

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

Wendell Berry

#87. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Wendell Berry

#88. Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.

Wendell Berry

#89. The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.

Wendell Berry

#90. Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.

Wendell Berry

#91. It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don't love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.

Wendell Berry

#92. You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.

Wendell Berry

#93. People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities.

Wendell Berry

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

Wendell Berry

#95. We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.

Wendell Berry

#96. The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in mariage. My grandfather made a peace here that has joined many who would otherwise have been divided. I am the child of his forgiveness.

Wendell Berry

#97. Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.

Wendell Berry

#98. The difference between a small local business that must share the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community by ruining the local community.

Wendell Berry

#99. Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.

Wendell Berry

#100. Except to the insane narrow-mindedness of industrial economics, selfishness does not pay.

Wendell Berry