Wendell Berry Quotes

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

6. “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: Quotes About Memories

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

Featured in: Quotes About Sea

12. “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

13. “Eating is an agricultural act.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

15. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

17. “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

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. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

24. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

Featured in: Future Quotes

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

45. “Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

47. “Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.”

— Wendell Berry

48. “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

49. “Physical health doesn’t exist apart from the health of other things. Health ultimately involves the community, and the community ultimately involves the place and natural life of that place, so that real health is harmony with the world.”

— Wendell Berry

50. “You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”

— Wendell Berry