Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.”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

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

— Wendell Berry

153. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

155. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

157. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

160. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

162. “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

163. “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

164. “One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.”

— Wendell Berry

165. “And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest. In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest. In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.”

— Wendell Berry

166. “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

167. “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

168. “If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.”

— Wendell Berry

169. “Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.”

— Wendell Berry

170. “The language that reveals also obscures.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

172. “The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.”

— Wendell Berry

173. “Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.”

— Wendell Berry

174. “Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.”

— Wendell Berry

175. “To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.”

— Wendell Berry

176. “Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.”

— Wendell Berry

177. “But, my dear boy, you don’t eat or drink the law, or sit in the shade of it or warm yourself by it, or wear it, or have your being in it. The law exists only to serve.”

— Wendell Berry

178. “We are living even now among punishments and ruins.”

— Wendell Berry

179. “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

180. “Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.”

— Wendell Berry

181. “No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to “spiritual” subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history’s most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.”

— Wendell Berry

182. “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

183. “Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it’s conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.”

— Wendell Berry

184. “The tractor’s arrival had signaled, among other things, agriculture’s shift from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a total dependence on costly fossil fuel.”

— Wendell Berry

185. “I don’t think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.”

— Wendell Berry

186. “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

187. “Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call “the economy” or “the free market” is less and less distinguishable from warfare.”

— Wendell Berry

188. “That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.”

— Wendell Berry

189. “The only true and effective “operator’s manual for spaceship earth” is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

191. “Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not ‘significant’ to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

194. “For too long the ideal role of the individual in our society – the role the talented young have aspired to almost by convention – has been that of the specialist. It has surely become as plain as it needs to be that what we need most now are not the specialists with their narrowed vision and short-range justifications, but men of sympathy and imagination and free intelligence who can recognize and hold themselves answerable to the complex responsibilities of a man’s life in the world.”

— Wendell Berry

195. “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

196. “There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.”

— Wendell Berry

197. “To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

199. “After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.”

— Wendell Berry

200. “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