Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

53. “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

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. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— 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. “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

63. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

67. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

70. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

77. “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

78. “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

79. “To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

82. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

89. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

95. “Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.”

— Wendell Berry

96. “If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.”

— Wendell Berry

97. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

99. “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.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry