Wendell Berry Quotes
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101. “The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves...”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

103. “Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.”

— Wendell Berry

Featured in: Vision Quotes

104. “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

105. “The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

108. “Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”

— Wendell Berry

109. “The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

— Wendell Berry

110. “Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.”

— Wendell Berry

111. “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

112. “You can’t know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction.”

— Wendell Berry

113. “The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.”

— Wendell Berry

114. “For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

— Wendell Berry

115. “The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.”

— Wendell Berry

116. “Our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land.”

— Wendell Berry

117. “There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

119. “We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”

— Wendell Berry

120. “Don’t pray for the rain to stop; pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.”

— Wendell Berry

121. “Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve-both the living human community in its natural household or neighborhood and the precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit.”

— Wendell Berry

122. “To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.”

— Wendell Berry

123. “I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.”

— Wendell Berry

124. “The only sustainable city – and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal – is a city in balance with its countryside.”

— Wendell Berry

125. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

128. “Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.”

— Wendell Berry

129. “Specialization is the great evil of civilization.”

— Wendell Berry

130. “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

131. “You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough.”

— Wendell Berry

132. “A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.”

— Wendell Berry

133. “All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.”

— Wendell Berry

134. “A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”

— Wendell Berry

135. “A teacher’s major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student’s grandchild.”

— Wendell Berry

136. “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.”

— Wendell Berry

137. “Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.”

— Wendell Berry

138. “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

139. “Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.”

— Wendell Berry

140. “Why I am NOT going to buy a computer.”

— Wendell Berry

141. “Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.”

— Wendell Berry

142. “I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.”

— Wendell Berry

Featured in: Healing Quotes

143. “How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

145. “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

146. “The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing and making.”

— Wendell Berry

147. “People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

149. “It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.”

— Wendell Berry

150. “It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.”

— Wendell Berry