Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Wendell Berry’s formula for a good life and a good community is simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbours. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

108. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

111. “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

112. “We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.”

— Wendell Berry

113. “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

114. “A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.”

— Wendell Berry

115. “To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.”

— Wendell Berry

116. “The significance – and ultimately the quality – of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

118. “To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.”

— Wendell Berry

119. “To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.”

— Wendell Berry

120. “To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.”

— Wendell Berry

121. “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

122. “Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens.”

— Wendell Berry

123. “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

124. “Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

126. “He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.”

— Wendell Berry

127. “It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.”

— Wendell Berry

128. “There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.”

— Wendell Berry

129. “We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.”

— Wendell Berry

130. “We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody’s enemy.”

— Wendell Berry

131. “I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

133. “Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.”

— Wendell Berry

134. “We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

137. “O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.”

— Wendell Berry

138. “But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free.”

— Wendell Berry

139. “The world is not given by our fathers, but borrowed from our children.”

— Wendell Berry

140. “The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.”

— Wendell Berry

141. “I know that I have life only insofar as I have love. I have no love except it come from Thee. Help me, please, to carry this candle against the wind.”

— Wendell Berry

142. “Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.”

— Wendell Berry

143. “Love changes, and in change is true.”

— Wendell Berry

144. “If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins.”

— Wendell Berry

145. “We clasp the hands of those who go before us.”

— Wendell Berry

146. “Time doesn’t stop. Your life doesn’t stop and wait until you get ready to start living it.”

— Wendell Berry

147. “You cannot save the land apart from the people, or the people apart from the land.”

— Wendell Berry

148. “We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.”

— Wendell Berry

149. “Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.”

— Wendell Berry

150. “I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led – make of that what you will.”

— Wendell Berry