Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

353. “The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

355. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

364. “To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there.”

— Wendell Berry

365. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

367. “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

368. “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

369. “Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.”

— Wendell Berry

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “The preserver of abundance is excellence.”

— Wendell Berry

380. “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

381. “If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a ‘movie version’ of a novel?”

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

384. “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

385. “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

386. “Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don’t buy anything new.”

— Wendell Berry

387. “This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part “the free world” seems to be regarding it as merely normal.”

— Wendell Berry

388. “Tell you,” he said, “there ain’t a way in this world to know what a human creature is going to do next.”

— Wendell Berry

389. “I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn.”

— Wendell Berry

390. “Out of context,” as Wes Jackson has said, “the best minds do the worst damage.”

— Wendell Berry

391. “Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you’d left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.”

— Wendell Berry

392. “When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.”

— Wendell Berry

393. “When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.”

— Wendell Berry

394. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

396. “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

397. “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”

— Wendell Berry

398. “Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land’s inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.”

— Wendell Berry

399. “She would do a mans work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time she wore them long. the girls of her day I think must have been like well wrapped gifts to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. ‘Well! What’s this!?”

— Wendell Berry

400. “She seems to give a respectful credence to the statement that “God is love”only to hurry on to explore with real interest the possibility that “God is wrath.” She can read from the book of Revelation with a ringing conviction in her voice that can make the creation seem only a stage setting for the triumphant thunderation of end.”

— Wendell Berry