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Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 16

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

We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by

We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. (pg. 323, The Pleasures of Eating)

Voice, Mind, Remember

Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.12, ReadHowYouWant.com

The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray." (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)

Practice, Ideas, Two

The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

Sacrifice, Ecosystems, Community

Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction - which is, ultimately, the principle of nonentity. It is to be willing in general for being to not-be. And once we have allied ourselves with that principle, we are foolish to think that we can control the results. (pg. 303, The Gift of Good Land)

Loss, Thinking, Land

Creation is thus God's presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard has written that "Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God's hidden Being." This means that we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate, for to every creature, the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God. (pg. 308, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)

Mean, Greek, Survival

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.308, Counterpoint

A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. The realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has always conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done.

Self, Issues, Abuse

The assumption is that people so ignorant and thoughtless and silly and greedy may simply call upon the Army Corps of Engineers in order to receive a clean and abundant supply of water from reservoirs in the mountains. A much likelier outcome is that they will be drinking an ever stronger mixture of sewage and mine acid and mud and cropspray and various other defecations of the industrial paradise.

Drinking, Silly, Army

It is a fact that the entire Kentucky River system, which the central part of the state complacently depends upon for its future water, is deteriorating rapidly because of strip mining, because of bad farming, because of industrial and agricultural pollutants, because of urban sewage. It is deteriorating, that is to say, because almost nobody cares, or cares to know, where water comes from, so long as it keeps coming.

Kentucky, Rivers, Long

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Fear, Loneliness, Novelty

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.9, Counterpoint Press

A tree forms itself in answer to its place and the light. Explain it how you will, the only thing explainable will be your explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV

Light, Tree, Answers

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

Differences, Perfect, Movement

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.12, Counterpoint

Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope. What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.

Heart, Sacrifice, Joy

Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.

Beautiful, Thinking, World

Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.

Lying, Rivers, Ducks

Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.87, Counterpoint Press

To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.

Common Sense, Mind, Desire

Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.

Rap, Tomorrow May Never Come, World

Wendell Berry (2001). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, p.171, Counterpoint Press

The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.

World, New World

Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

Invest in the millenium.

"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front". Book by Wendell Berry, 1970.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

Laughter, Joyful

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

Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in "justice" or in affirmation of "rights" or in defense of "peace" do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.

Rights, Justice, Defense

"The Failure of War" by Wendell Berry, www.yesmagazine.org. November 5, 2001.

We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.

Alternatives, Violence, Blind

Wendell Berry (2012). “The Long-Legged House”, p.79, Counterpoint Press

This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.

Lying, Book, Reflection

Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

Grief, Doe, World

We clasp the hands of those who go before us.

Hands

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.10, Counterpoint Press

The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.

Country, Made, Concrete

Wendell Berry (2009). “Remembering”, p.96, Counterpoint Press

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