Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

53. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

55. “Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind’s commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.”

— Wendell Berry

56. “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

57. “You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”

— Wendell Berry

58. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

60. “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

61. “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

62. “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

71. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

83. “The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.”

— Wendell Berry

84. “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

85. “The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

90. “It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

92. “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

93. “The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

98. “The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry