Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

204. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

206. “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

207. “As I did not know then but know now, the surface of the river is like a living soul, which is easy to disturb, is often disturbed, but, growing calm, shows what it was, is, and will be.”

— Wendell Berry

208. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

211. “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

212. “A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

214. “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

215. “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

216. “It was the kind of winter day that makes you forget that the weather was ever any different, and you feel like it has been winter all the way back to Adam.”

— Wendell Berry

217. “I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men...”

— Wendell Berry

218. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

221. “And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present.”

— Wendell Berry

222. “We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.”

— Wendell Berry

223. “All the episodes from my stories and novels are not about food only, but about meals. You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

225. “When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.”

— Wendell Berry

226. “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

227. “The interaction, the interdependence, of life and death, which in nature is the source of an inexhaustible fecundity, is the basis of a set of analogies, to which agriculture and the rest of the human economy must conform in order to endure, and which is ultimately religious...”

— Wendell Berry

228. “People talk about “job creation,” as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.”

— Wendell Berry

229. “The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a ‘practical’ point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

232. “The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

234. “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

235. “There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.”

— Wendell Berry

236. “We don’t know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

238. “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

239. “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

241. “American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.”

— Wendell Berry

242. “Monsanto doesn’t care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.”

— Wendell Berry

243. “The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.”

— Wendell Berry

244. “One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”

— Wendell Berry

245. “I became a sort of garden fanatic, and I am not over it yet. You can take a few seed peas, dry and dead, and sow them in a little furrow, and they will sprout into a row of pea vines and bear more peas – it may not be a miracle, but that is a matter of opinion.”

— Wendell Berry

246. “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

247. “The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive.”

— Wendell Berry

248. “There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.”

— Wendell Berry

249. “So friends, every day do something that won’t compute.”

— Wendell Berry

250. “But this is not the story of a life. It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave.”

— Wendell Berry