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Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 12

All Quotes Abuse Affection Age Ambition Art Assumption Character Children Choices Christianity Commitment Community Country Culture Darkness Desire Doubt Drinking Eating Economy Energy Environment Expectations Failing Farming Feelings Food Freedom Generosity Genius Giving Giving Up Grace Greed Grief Growth Hatred Healing Heart Heaven Home House Humility Hurt Ignorance Imagination Inspirational Inspiring Jesus Journey Joy Justice Language Life Loneliness Lying Memories Military Morning Mountain Nature Past Pleasure Poverty Prayer Quality Rain Reading Responsibility Running Sacrifice Silence Simplicity Sin Soul Suffering Survival Sustainability Taxes Technology Understanding Violence Vision Waiting War Water Weakness Work Writing

The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.

The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.

Animal, Evil, Hierarchy

Wendell Berry (2011). “Standing by Words”, p.149, Counterpoint Press

The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.

Looks, Dare

Why I am NOT going to buy a computer

Computer

Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder (2014). “Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder”, p.156, Counterpoint

Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.

Facts, Quantity

Wendell Berry (2000). “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition”, Counterpoint LLC

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.

Vacation, Mind, Cards

Wendell Berry (2013). “A Country of Marriage: Poems”, p.16, Counterpoint Press

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.

Responsibility, Needs, Welfare

Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.10, ReadHowYouWant.com

It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams. Or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around.

Animal, Rooms, Hamburgers

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.148, Counterpoint

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use.

Money, Home, School

The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.

Jobs, People, Entrepreneur

We are now, measurably, reducing the availability of these life-supporting goods which we can think of (though only on the conditions of good health and good care) as self-renewing or "sustainable." We are also destroying rapidly the supplies of the fossil fuels, which are limited and not renewable, and on which we have become totally dependent.

Thinking, Self, Availability

Wendell Berry (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.146, Counterpoint Press

We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.

Miracle, Alive, Mystery

Wendell Berry (2001). “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition”, Counterpoint Press

The sense of it may come with watching a flock of cedar waxwings eating wild grapes in the top of the woods on a November afternoon. Everything they do is leisurely. They pick the grapes with a curious deliberation, comb their feathers, converse in high windy whistles. Now and then one will fly out and back in a sort of dancing flight full of whimsical flutters and turns. They are like farmers loafing in their own fields on Sunday. Though they have no Sundays, their days are full of sabbaths.

Sunday, Dancing, Cedars

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Plant, Millennium

Wendell Berry (2009). “The Mad Farmer Poems”, p.12, Counterpoint Press

There are endless ways to amuse oneself and be idle, and most of them lie outside the woods. I assume that when a man goes to the woods he goes because he needs to. I think he is drawn to the wilderness much as he is drawn to a woman: it is, in its way, his opposite. It is as far as possible unlike his home or his work or anything he will ever manufacture. For that reason he can take from it a solace-an understanding of himself, of what he needs and what he can do without-such as he can find nowhere else.

Lying, Home, Men

After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.

Lying, Grief, Darkness

Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

World, Eating, Used

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.149, Counterpoint Press

A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written.

Family, Farmers, Written

It is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever. I turn against you, I break from you, I turn to you. We hurt, and are hurt, and have each other for healing. It is healing. It is never whole.

Hurt, Healing, Broken

Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.81, Counterpoint Press

When the mind's an empty room The clear days come.

Empty Rooms, Mind, Clear Day

Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.193, Counterpoint Press

But in fact as knowledge expands globally it is being lost locally. This is the paramount truth of the modern history of rural places everywhere in the world. And it is the gravest problem of land use: Modern humans typically are using places whose nature they have never known and whose history they have forgotten; thus ignorant, they almost necessarily abuse what they use.

Land, Abuse, Ignorant

A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.

Past, Needs, Assumption

Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.121, Counterpoint

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato

Baby, Age, Citizens

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.85, Counterpoint

The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

Exactly Is, Speak, Ability

Wendell Berry (2010). “Imagination in Place”, p.13, Counterpoint

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present

Light, Being Thankful, Pulse

Wendell Berry (2005). “Hannah Coulter: A Novel”, p.148, Counterpoint Press

Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma.

Depressing, People, Levels

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