Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.”

— Wendell Berry

202. “Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

204. “We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.”

— Wendell Berry

205. “The mercy of the world is you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

— Wendell Berry

206. “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

207. “Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?”

— Wendell Berry

208. “To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one’s ability to know; it enfeebles one’s ability to feel and think.”

— Wendell Berry

209. “Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.”

— Wendell Berry

210. “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

211. “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

212. “The word health belongs to a family of words, a listing of which will suggest how far the consideration of health must carry us: heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, holy.”

— Wendell Berry

213. “A man’s life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

216. “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

217. “The discussion about food doesn’t make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.”

— Wendell Berry

218. “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

219. “To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

221. “The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.”

— Wendell Berry

222. “Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful.”

— Wendell Berry

223. “I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever.”

— Wendell Berry

224. “There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.”

— Wendell Berry

225. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a ‘movie version’ of a novel?”

— Wendell Berry

232. “Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.”

— Wendell Berry

233. “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

234. “The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.”

— Wendell Berry

235. “The environment,” as we call it, is intimately with us. We’re in it. It’s in us. But also we are it, and it is us.”

— Wendell Berry

236. “The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.”

— Wendell Berry

237. “It is the privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable.”

— Wendell Berry

238. “It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don’t love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.”

— Wendell Berry

239. “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

240. “The walls of the rational, empirical world are famously porous. What come through are dreams, imaginings, inspirations, visions, revelations. There is no use in stooping over these with a magnifying lens.”

— Wendell Berry

241. “People do not become wealthy by treating one another or the world kindly and with respect.”

— Wendell Berry

242. “There is a use for everyone.”

— Wendell Berry

243. “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

244. “Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it?”

— Wendell Berry

245. “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

246. “Without propriety of scale, and the acceptance of limits which that implies, there can be no form – and here we reunite science and art.”

— Wendell Berry

247. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

249. “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

250. “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