Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

253. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

256. “If the devil doesn’t exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they’re smart enough to be?”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

264. “Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?”

— Wendell Berry

265. “He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”

— Wendell Berry

266. “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

267. “What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place... nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.”

— Wendell Berry

268. “LEACH: You write by hand and, famously, do not own a computer. Is there some kind of physical pleasure to be taken in writing by hand? BERRY: Yes, but I don’t know how I’d prove it. I have a growing instinct to avoid mechanical distractions and screens because I want to be in the presence of this place. I like to write by the ambient daylight because I don’t want to miss it. As I grow older, I grieve over every moment I’m gone from this place, because it is inexhaustibly interesting to me.”

— Wendell Berry

269. “A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

271. “There can be no such thing as a “global village.” No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.”

— Wendell Berry

272. “We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.”

— Wendell Berry

273. “To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we ‘know’ that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

275. “Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.”

— Wendell Berry

276. “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

277. “Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.”

— Wendell Berry

278. “My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.”

— Wendell Berry

279. “Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.”

— Wendell Berry

280. “As I went about my work then as a young woman, and still now when I am old, Grandmam has been often close to me in my thoughts. And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.”

— Wendell Berry

281. “It seemed to us that we’d never thought of him before as a man who would die. He never had thought of himself in that way. Until that year, although he’d cursed his weakness and his age, he’d either ignored the idea of his death or had refused to believe in it. He’d only thought of himself as living.”

— Wendell Berry

282. “Those who say Islam is a warlike religion must ask if Christianity has been as well.”

— Wendell Berry

283. “Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.”

— Wendell Berry

284. “But a man with a machine and inadequate culture – such as I was when I made my pond – is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.”

— Wendell Berry

285. “Do not tax your life with forethought of grief.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

287. “The river’s injury is its shape.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

289. “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

290. “Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.”

— Wendell Berry

291. “These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.”

— Wendell Berry

292. “Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money – a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One’s.”

— Wendell Berry

293. “But thinking of Mattie’s marriage, I saw too how a marriage, in bringing two people into each other’s presence, must include loneliness and error. I imagined a moment when the husband and wife realize that their marriage includes their faults, that they do not perfect each other, and that in making their marriage they also fail it and must carry to the grave things they cannot give away.”

— Wendell Berry

294. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

296. “The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order – a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery.”

— Wendell Berry

297. “The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.”

— Wendell Berry

298. “We all come from divorce. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can’t put it all back together again. What you can do, is the only thing that you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them together. Two things! Not all things.”

— Wendell Berry

299. “I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.”

— Wendell Berry

300. “I’d had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn’t apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all. But it consoled me in a way too; I could see that if I got them all read and had no more surprises in that line, I would have been sorry.”

— Wendell Berry