Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

324. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

326. “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

327. “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

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328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

342. “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

343. “People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.”

— Wendell Berry

344. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

346. “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

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. “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

349. “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

350. “We don’t need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another-that surely would be to have life more abundantly.”

— Wendell Berry