Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term ‘agribusiness.’”

— Wendell Berry

303. “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

304. “The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.”

— Wendell Berry

305. “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

306. “Scared for health, afraid of death, bored, dissatisfied, vengeful, greedy, ignorant, and gullible – these are the qualities of the ideal consumer. Can we imagine a way of education that would turn passive consumers into active and informed critics, capable of using their own minds in their own defense?”

— Wendell Berry

307. “Education has increasingly been reduced to job training, preparing young people not for responsible adulthood and citizenship but for expert servitude to the corporations.”

— Wendell Berry

308. “The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you’ll probably be the last one to know exactly how you’re serving the art and how the art is serving you.”

— Wendell Berry

309. “The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.”

— Wendell Berry

310. “I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead.”

— Wendell Berry

311. “Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.”

— Wendell Berry

312. “Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.”

— Wendell Berry

313. “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

314. “Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful.”

— Wendell Berry

315. “One of the best things you can do in this world is take a nap in the woods.”

— Wendell Berry

316. “Soon the majority of the world’s people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions and local needs.”

— Wendell Berry

317. “I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.”

— Wendell Berry

318. “The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.”

— Wendell Berry

319. “The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.”

— Wendell Berry

320. “Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.”

— Wendell Berry

321. “My label is just “good farming”, which isn’t something you can put on a t-shirt.”

— Wendell Berry

322. “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

323. “Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator’s love for it.”

— Wendell Berry

324. “He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.”

— Wendell Berry

325. “The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.”

— Wendell Berry

326. “Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you must’nt shirk it. Love, after all, hopeth all things. But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

328. “What would be the point of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded and poisoned, or personally free in a world entirely controlled by the government or enlightened by television?”

— Wendell Berry

329. “For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.”

— Wendell Berry

330. “There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics.”

— Wendell Berry

331. “The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth.”

— Wendell Berry

332. “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

333. “What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?”

— Wendell Berry

334. “A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.”

— Wendell Berry

335. “It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people’s money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.”

— Wendell Berry

336. “After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.”

— Wendell Berry

337. “The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an “object.” This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.”

— Wendell Berry

338. “A man ought to study the wilderness of a place before applying to it the ways he learned in another place.”

— Wendell Berry

339. “I have books to read, and much to sit and watch. I try not to let good things go by unnoticed.”

— Wendell Berry

340. “It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.”

— Wendell Berry

341. “She was a pretty girl, and I was moved by her prettiness. Her hair was brown at the verge of red, and curly. Her face was still a little freckled. But it was her eyes that most impressed me. They were nearly black and had a liquid luster. The brief, laughing look that she had given me made me feel extraordinarily seen, as if after that I might be visible in the dark.”

— Wendell Berry

342. “The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven. The great aim of modern life has been to improve the future – or even just to reach the future, assuming that the future will inevitably be “better.”

— Wendell Berry

343. “The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition, in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, is that the result of competition is inevitably good for everybody, that altruistic ends may be met by a system without altruistic motives or altruistic means.”

— Wendell Berry

344. “So it is that the life force may take possession of a man – so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.”

— Wendell Berry

345. “But he learned what he had to, and he changed, and so he made himself exceptional.”

— Wendell Berry

346. “He was a humorous, good-natured man, maybe because he hoped for little and expected less and took his satisfactions where he found them.”

— Wendell Berry

347. “This is the justice that we are learning from the ecologists: you cannot damage what you are dependent upon without damaging yourself.”

— Wendell Berry

348. “The corporate approach to agriculture or manufacturing or medicine or war increasingly undertakes to help at the risk of harm, sometimes of great harm. And once the risk of harm is appraised as “acceptable,” the result often is absurdity: We destroy a village in order to save it; we destroy freedom in order to save it; we destroy the world in order to live in it.”

— Wendell Berry

349. “We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.”

— Wendell Berry

350. “The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”

— Wendell Berry