Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 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. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful.”

— Wendell Berry

323. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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. “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

333. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

341. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

343. “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

344. “For agrarians, the correct response is to stand confidently on our fundamental premise, which is both democratic and ecological: the land is a gift of immeasurable value. If it is a gift, then it is a gift to all the living in all time. To withhold it from some is finally to destroy it for all. For a few powerful people to own or control it all, or decide its fate, is wrong.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

349. “We weren’t allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry