Top 100 Wendell Berry Quotes
#1. Not only do I recommend [Wendell] Berry to anyone who will talk to me for more than seven seconds, but I buy his books in quantity and send them to people. I bought a few dozen of his newest, "Our Only World."
Nick Offerman
#2. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. - Wendell Berry
Barbara Brown Taylor
#3. Make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
#4. Modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
#5. Never forget: we are alive within mysteries." - Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
#6. Wendell Berry in "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer." "I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work." Ethan
Mark Sundeen
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world's beauty and abundance.
Wendell Berry
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.
Wendell Berry
#14. You think winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.
Wendell Berry
#15. It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.
Wendell Berry
#16. This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me.
Wendell Berry
#17. The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.
Wendell Berry
#18. The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.
Wendell Berry
#20. Give your approval to all you cannot understand.
Wendell Berry
#21. But we didn't speak of what was bothering us the most. Maybe we didn't need to. It couldn't have been "talked out." It had to be worn out.
Wendell Berry
#22. An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.
Wendell Berry
#23. In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time.
Wendell Berry
#24. The inlet
our friend looks as he did
when we first knew him,
and until I wake I believe
I will die of grief, for I know
that this boy grew into a man
who was a faithful friend
who died.
Wendell Berry
#25. The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.
Wendell Berry
#26. I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever.
Wendell Berry
#27. The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.
Wendell Berry
#28. To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.
Wendell Berry
#29. 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
#30. There are two healings: nature's, and ours and nature's. Nature's will come in spite of us, after us, over the graves of its wasters, as it comes to the forsaken fields. The healing that is ours and nature's will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.
Wendell Berry
#31. The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
Wendell Berry
#32. The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.
Wendell Berry
#33. Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
Wendell Berry
#34. Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.
Wendell Berry
#36. XII Do not live for death, pay it no fear or wonder. This is the firmest law of the truest faith. Death is the dew that wets the grass in the early morning dark. It is God's entirely. Withdraw your fatal homage, and live.
Wendell Berry
#37. 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
#38. It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.
Wendell Berry
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. When the mind's an empty room
The clear days come.
Wendell Berry
#42. Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.
Wendell Berry
#43. The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflied that fly up in flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.
Wendell Berry
#44. I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.
Wendell Berry
#45. What the government will or will not do is finally beside the point. If people do not have the government they want, then they will have a government that they must either change or endure. Finally,
Wendell Berry
#46. Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
Wendell Berry
#47. 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
#48. To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
#50. The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
Wendell Berry
#51. Jesus' military career has never compelled my belief.
Wendell Berry
#52. The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use.
Wendell Berry
#53. Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came.
Wendell Berry
#54. If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
Wendell Berry
#55. 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
#56. As much as any of the old-timers, he regarded the Depression as not over and done with but merely absent for a while, like Halley's comet.
Wendell Berry
#57. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Wendell Berry
#58. One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.
Wendell Berry
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. He was a humorous, good-natured man, maybe because he hoped for little and expected less and took his satisfactions where he found them.
Wendell Berry
#63. My label is just "good farming", which isn't something you can put on a t-shirt.
Wendell Berry
#64. 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
#65. People who want to see the beauty of nature from motorboats and automobiles would obviously be just as pleased, and as fully recreated, at a drive-in movie.
Wendell Berry
#66. Don't pray for the rain to stop; pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.
Wendell Berry
#67. The solution, many times more complex and difficult, would be to go beyond our ideas, obviously insane, of war as the way to peace and of permanent damage to the ecosphere as the way to wealth.
Wendell Berry
#68. A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
Wendell Berry
#69. Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.
Wendell Berry
#70. 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
#71. If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
Wendell Berry
#72. 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
#73. I am ashamed and deeply distressed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.
Wendell Berry
#74. The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, ... but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else.
Wendell Berry
#75. He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.
Wendell Berry
#76. Troy went into debt and bought his new equipment because he didn't want to be held back by demanding circumstances.
Wendell Berry
#77. 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
#79. But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.
Wendell Berry
#80. Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
Wendell Berry
#81. 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
#82. The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied.
Wendell Berry
#83. There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics.
Wendell Berry
#84. The walls of the rational, empirical world are famously porous. What come through are dreams, imaginings, inspirations, visions, revelations. There is no use in stooping over these with a magnifying lens.
Wendell Berry
#85. 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
#86. Once there was a man who filmed his vacation./He went flying down the river in his boat/with his video camera to his eye, making/a moving picture of the moving river/ ... [At the end of his vacation,]/With a flick of the switch, there it would be./But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.
Wendell Berry
#87. Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
Wendell Berry
#88. The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
Wendell Berry
#89. The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
Wendell Berry
#90. What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
Wendell Berry
#91. Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.
Wendell Berry
#92. His work has been his necessity and his desire.
Wendell Berry
#93. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Wendell Berry
#94. I know that I have life only insofar as I have love. I have no love except it come from Thee. Help me, please, to carry this candle against the wind.
Wendell Berry
#95. Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98)
Wendell Berry
#96. Our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land
Wendell Berry
#97. 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
#98. There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.
Wendell Berry
#99. 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
#100. The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else.
Wendell Berry
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