Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “One of the best things you can do in this world is take a nap in the woods.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

359. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

365. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

367. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

369. “In solitude, we lose our loneliness.”

— Wendell Berry

370. “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

371. “We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.”

— Wendell Berry

372. “Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”

— Wendell Berry

373. “And yet in Port William, as everywhere else, it was already the second decade of the twentieth century. And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else.”

— Wendell Berry

374. “However, if we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody’s business, and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns.”

— Wendell Berry

375. “Happiness had a way of coming to you and making you sad. You would think, ‘There seems to have been a time when I deserved such a happiness and needed it, like a day’s pay, and now I have no use for it at all.’ How can you be happy, how can you live, when all the things that make you happy grieve you nearly to death?”

— Wendell Berry

376. “Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.”

— Wendell Berry

377. “Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

379. “The preserver of abundance is excellence.”

— Wendell Berry

380. “Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night. Order is only the possibility of rest.”

— Wendell Berry

381. “Oversimplified moral certainties – always requiring hostility, always potentially violent – isolate us from mercy, pity, peace, and love and leave us lonely and dangerous.”

— Wendell Berry

382. “People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society.”

— Wendell Berry

383. “And there is no use in saying that if we can invent the nuclear bomb and fly to the moon, we can solve hunger and related problems of land use. Epic feats of engineering require only a few brilliant technicians and a lot of money. But feeding a world of people year to year for a long time requires cultures of husbandry fitted to the nature of millions of unique small places – precisely the kind of cultures that industrialism has purposely disvalued, uprooted, and destroyed.”

— Wendell Berry

384. “For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.”

— Wendell Berry

385. “But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life.”

— Wendell Berry

386. “When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.”

— Wendell Berry

387. “The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians “run”. Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.”

— Wendell Berry

388. “For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father’s dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.”

— Wendell Berry

389. “One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.”

— Wendell Berry

390. “That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.”

— Wendell Berry

391. “There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty: the spirit of the creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannot follow.”

— Wendell Berry

392. “I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever. Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?”

— Wendell Berry

393. “To accept that there is nothing to do is to despair. It is to become in some fundamental way less than human. Those of us who are protesting are protesting in part for our own sake to keep ourselves whole as human beings.”

— Wendell Berry

394. “Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, ‘Thy will be done,’ and then again I am free and can go to sleep.”

— Wendell Berry

395. “We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.”

— Wendell Berry

396. “After you have said “thy will be done,” what more can be said?”

— Wendell Berry

397. “He stands under them, looks up, sees, knows, and knows that he does not know.”

— Wendell Berry

398. “This is the man who will be my grandfather – the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.”

— Wendell Berry

399. “If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.”

— Wendell Berry

400. “As much as any of the old-timers, he regarded the Depression as not over and done with but merely absent for a while, like Halley’s comet.”

— Wendell Berry