Wendell Berry quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Wendell Berry on Wise Famous Quotes.

The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction.

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred,

The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.

The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children's education.

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.

The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.

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

A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

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

Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.

What I stand for is what I stand on.

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

Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship.

In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.

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.

Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.

Be thankful and repay Growth with good work and care. Work done in gratitude Kindly, and well, is prayer.

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

Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!

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

What can't be helped must be endured.

The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.

I had reached a level of sophistication at which I could know I was fooling myself and still fool myself.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

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

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

The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.

A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.

The world is whole beyond human knowing.

If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.

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

You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.

It's sad that we live in a society that has the refrain 'thank God it's Friday, that means you despise 5/7ths of your life.

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.

I have always loved a window, especially an open one.

My label is just "good farming", which isn't something you can put on a t-shirt.

I've had a good life, and was born to and among people I've admired and loved.

A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.

To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.

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

Do not tax your life with forethought of grief.

What can't be helped must be endured, Mat Feltner said. And he was a man who knew.

And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

Never forget: we are alive within mysteries." - Wendell Berry

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.

Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.

To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.

Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one.

We live the given life, and not the planned.

There is a use for everyone.

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

But grief and griever alike endure.

An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.

The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. (pg. 260, The Idea of a Local Economy)

If the devil doesn't exist ... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?

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

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

There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.

The promoters of the global economy ... see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.

In losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.

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.

Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.

There's nothing under the ground that's worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.

Troy went into debt and bought his new equipment because he didn't want to be held back by demanding circumstances.

The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied.

To mind being disliked by a woman you don't desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.

The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

Any abundance, in any amount, is illusory if it does not safeguard its producers.

One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.

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

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.

For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.

Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.

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.

A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.

A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy.

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

People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.

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

Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.

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

His work has been his necessity and his desire.

It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.

Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.

You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.

We can fight the global economy with a strong local economy.

Why I am NOT going to buy a computer

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

Oh Lord, make us able
To eat all that's on this table,
And if there's some we haven't got
Bring it to us while it's hot

We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.

A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.