Wendell Berry Quotes
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101. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

103. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

109. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

118. “The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

120. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

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

— Wendell Berry

129. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

136. “I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it’s being ruined is hard.”

— Wendell Berry

137. “We live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory.”

— Wendell Berry

138. “It is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever. I turn against you, I break from you, I turn to you. We hurt, and are hurt, and have each other for healing. It is healing. It is never whole.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

141. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

143. “Corn and bean people, I’m afraid, have extremely specialized minds.”

— Wendell Berry

144. “It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

146. “The two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.”

— Wendell Berry

147. “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

148. “I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.”

— Wendell Berry

149. “It’s impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.”

— Wendell Berry

150. “It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.”

— Wendell Berry