Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

153. “It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

155. “The world is whole beyond human knowing.”

— Wendell Berry

156. “The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.”

— Wendell Berry

157. “Give your approval to all you cannot understand.”

— Wendell Berry

158. “What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.”

— Wendell Berry

159. “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

160. “The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

162. “The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.”

— Wendell Berry

163. “We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.”

— Wendell Berry

164. “I have thrown away my lantern, and I can see the dark.”

— Wendell Berry

165. “All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman’s silence receiving the river’s grace, the gardener’s musing on rows...”

— Wendell Berry

166. “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

167. “When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.”

— Wendell Berry

168. “You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.”

— Wendell Berry

169. “Love in this world doesn’t come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.”

— Wendell Berry

170. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

172. “An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

174. “All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.”

— Wendell Berry

175. “You think winter will never end, and then, when you don’t expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.”

— Wendell Berry

176. “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

177. “Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!”

— Wendell Berry

178. “The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

180. “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

181. “It’s mighty hard right now to think of anything that’s precious that isn’t endangered. There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

183. “Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.”

— Wendell Berry

184. “You can’t live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.”

— Wendell Berry

185. “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

186. “It’s the impeded stream that sings.”

— Wendell Berry

187. “A farmer’s market is worth more than everything I’ve written.”

— Wendell Berry

188. “True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.”

— Wendell Berry

189. “So it is that the life force may take possession of a man – so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

191. “I have always loved a window, especially an open one.”

— Wendell Berry

192. “The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.”

— Wendell Berry

193. “When the mind’s an empty room The clear days come.”

— Wendell Berry

194. “We can fight the global economy with a strong local economy.”

— Wendell Berry

195. “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

196. “The river, the river itself, leaves marks but bears none. It is only water flowing in a path that other water has worn.”

— Wendell Berry

197. “To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn’t acknowledge limits.”

— Wendell Berry

198. “A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy.”

— Wendell Berry

199. “Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.”

— Wendell Berry

200. “Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.”

— Wendell Berry