Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

362. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

368. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

370. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

372. “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

373. “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

374. “The preserver of abundance is excellence.”

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

— Wendell Berry

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

383. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

389. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

391. “For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.”

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

— Wendell Berry

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

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

— Wendell Berry

400. “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