Wendell Berry Quotes
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151. “We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

153. “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

154. “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

155. “The language that reveals also obscures.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

157. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

159. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

173. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

175. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

187. “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

188. “When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest: There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but of the body of the Lord. The blessed plants and the sea, yield it to the imagination intact.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

190. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

192. “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

193. “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

194. “If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.”

— Wendell Berry

195. “The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.”

— Wendell Berry

196. “Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.”

— Wendell Berry

197. “I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature.”

— Wendell Berry

198. “A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry