Wendell Berry Quotes
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201. “We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

206. “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

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. “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

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

221. “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

222. “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

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. “As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.”

— Wendell Berry

225. “Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence – that is to wish to preserve all of its humble house – holds and neighbourhoods.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

227. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

229. “There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.”

— Wendell Berry

230. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

232. “The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.”

— Wendell Berry

233. “Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come in among these trees you must leave behind the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes. You must come without weapon or tool, alone, expecting nothing, remembering nothing, into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.”

— Wendell Berry

234. “The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

236. “Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.”

— Wendell Berry

237. “Oikonomia is the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run. Chrematistics is the art of maximizing the accumulation by individuals of abstract exchange value in the form of money in the short run.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

239. “In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.”

— Wendell Berry

240. “He loved the woods, where it seemed to him that every life was secret, including his own.”

— Wendell Berry

241. “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

242. “If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.”

— Wendell Berry

243. “Another place! it’s enough to grieve me – that old dream of going, of becoming a better man just by getting up and going to a better place.”

— Wendell Berry

244. “The significance – and ultimately the quality – of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.”

— Wendell Berry

245. “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

246. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

250. “Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.”

— Wendell Berry