Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The earth is what we all have in common.”

— Wendell Berry

Featured in: Positive Short Quotes, Nature Quotes, Quotes About the World, Earth Day Quotes

2. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Veganism

3. “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

— Wendell Berry

4. “If you eat, you are involved in agriculture.”

— Wendell Berry

5. “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

Featured in: Environment Quotes, Quotes About Memories

6. “What I stand for is what I stand on.”

— Wendell Berry

7. “It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

— Wendell Berry

8. “A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.”

— Wendell Berry

9. “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

10. “We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

12. “When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.”

— Wendell Berry

13. “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”

— Wendell Berry

Featured in: Quotes About the Sea

14. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

16. “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

17. “Eating is an agricultural act.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

Featured in: Justice Quotes

19. “And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”

— Wendell Berry

20. “A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.”

— Wendell Berry

21. “Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.”

— Wendell Berry

22. “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

23. “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”

— Wendell Berry

24. “The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed.”

— Wendell Berry

25. “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”

— Wendell Berry

26. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

28. “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

29. “We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.”

— Wendell Berry

30. “We live the given life, and not the planned.”

— Wendell Berry

31. “I’d rather rely on mother nature’s wisdom than man’s cleverness.”

— Wendell Berry

32. “We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.”

— Wendell Berry

33. “Be joyful because it is humanly possible.”

— Wendell Berry

34. “Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in “justice” or in affirmation of “rights” or in defense of “peace” do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.”

— Wendell Berry

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

Featured in: Future Quotes

39. “Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

42. “A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”

— Wendell Berry

43. “Thinking is the most overrated human activity.”

— Wendell Berry

44. “The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

47. “The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves...”

— Wendell Berry

48. “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

49. “What can’t be helped must be endured.”

— Wendell Berry

50. “Willing to die you give up your will; keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.”

— Wendell Berry