Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don’t buy anything new.”

— Wendell Berry

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Wendell Berry

407. “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

408. “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

409. “Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health – and create profitable diseases and dependences – by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.”

— Wendell Berry

410. “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

411. “Invest in the millenium.”

— Wendell Berry

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”

— Wendell Berry

417. “A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.”

— Wendell Berry

418. “As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.”

— Wendell Berry

419. “Any abundance, in any amount, is illusory if it does not safeguard its producers.”

— Wendell Berry

420. “Maury’s mind was practical, solidly founded on history, memory, and experience. It was in no way academic or theoretical. He did not substitute vocabulary for knowledge.”

— Wendell Berry

421. “Never forget: we are alive within mysteries.” – Wendell Berry.”

— Wendell Berry

422. “There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that’s both extensive and centralized. There’s no substitute for petroleum. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.”

— Wendell Berry

423. “As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”

— Wendell Berry

424. “What I am sure of is that we have lost the old apprehension of Nature as a being accessible to imagination, linking Heaven and Earth, making and informing the incarnate creation, and requiring of humanity an obedience at once worshipful, ethical, and economic.”

— Wendell Berry

425. “I finally knew... why Christ’s prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed the prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed his divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal.”

— Wendell Berry

426. “You see, we don’t have enough sense to make these decisions. Somehow, you just get led to where you’re supposed to be, if you’re willing to submit.”

— Wendell Berry

427. “He was all show, and he had the conviction, as such people do, that show is the same as substance. He didn’t think he was fooling other people; he had fooled himself.”

— Wendell Berry

428. “When “husbandry” becomes “science,” the lowly has been exalted and the rustic has become urbane. Purporting to increase the sophistication of the humble art of farming, this change in fact brutally oversimplifies it.”

— Wendell Berry

429. “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

430. “If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.”

— Wendell Berry

431. “He went through the old motions of his life, taking care of what needed caring for, keeping mostly quiet about what was on his mind. But his hard waiting changed him; you could see it in his face.”

— Wendell Berry

432. “It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.”

— Wendell Berry

433. “Aunt Beulah could hear the dust moats collide in a sunbeam.”

— Wendell Berry

434. “And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave. What do I have that I am using up? For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.”

— Wendell Berry

435. “It just all of a sudden came over me, so that in one breath I was lost and a stranger, and in the next I was found.”

— Wendell Berry

436. “I don’t remember when I did not know Port William, the town and the neighborhood. My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life. That story has surprised me almost every day – but now, in the year 1986, so near the end, it seems not surprising at all but only a little strange, as if it all has happened to somebody I don’t yet quite know. Certainly, all of it has happened to somebody younger.”

— Wendell Berry

437. “All women is brothers,′ Burley Coulter used to say, and then look at you with a dead sober look as if he didn’t know why you thought that was funny. But, as usual, he was telling the truth. Or part of it.”

— Wendell Berry

438. “In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.”

— Wendell Berry

439. “And if we ask what are the cultural resources that can inform and sustain a proper creaturely and stewardly awareness of the lives in a farmer’s keeping, I believe that we will find them gathered under the heading of husbandry.”

— Wendell Berry

440. “This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me.”

— Wendell Berry

441. “I knew what he was doing. He was walking away from his thoughts but his thoughts were staying with him.”

— Wendell Berry

442. “The beauty that I am speaking of now was that of a woman who has come into knowledge and strength and who, knowing her hardships, trusts her strength and goes about her work even with a kind of happiness, serene somehow and secure.”

— Wendell Berry

443. “To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.”

— Wendell Berry

444. “Especially among Christians in positions of wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus’ commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective “Christian”.”

— Wendell Berry

445. “He nearly always seems steady, reined pretty tight. But it’s no trouble to look at him now and see that it has been a long time since he has been at rest in himself.”

— Wendell Berry

446. “White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we finally had to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for customary indifference to utstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents.”

— Wendell Berry

447. “She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry.”

— Wendell Berry

448. “But whatever you hope, you will find out that you can’t bargain with your life on your own terms. It is always going to be proving itself worse or better than you hoped.”

— Wendell Berry

449. “Do we, for instance, carry on our work in our nest or do we only reside and get our mail there? Is our nest a place of consumption only or is it also a place of production?”

— Wendell Berry

450. “CONCERNED AS HE is that the usable be put to use, that there be no waste, still there is nothing utilitarian or mechanistic about Mr. Lapp’s farm – or his mind. His aim, it seems, is not that the place should be put to the fullest use, but that it should have the most abundant life.”

— Wendell Berry