Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

264. “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

265. “For if there was any kindness in slavery it was dependent on the docility of the slaves; any slave who was unwilling to be a slave broke through the myth of paternalism and benevolence, and brought down on himself the violence inherent in the system. A.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

267. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

282. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

284. “We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.”

— Wendell Berry

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

289. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

295. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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