Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

104. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

106. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

116. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

119. “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

120. “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

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. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

132. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

140. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

142. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

144. “We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that 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

145. “The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.”

— Wendell Berry

146. “New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. 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

147. “The language that reveals also obscures.”

— Wendell Berry

148. “We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

150. “Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.”

— Wendell Berry