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Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 18

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

Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.

Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.

Independent, Thinking, Always Trying

Wendell Berry (2012). “It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture & Other Essays”, p.27, Counterpoint Press

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.

House, Conventions, Mailboxes

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.40, Counterpoint Press

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

World, Found

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.311, Counterpoint

Supporters of the war are constantly asking those who oppose it: Why don't you deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side? The answer, so far as I am concerned, is that I do deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side. But I am responsible for the wrongs and atrocities committed by our side. And I am no longer able to participate in the assumption that atrocities committed by remote control are less objectionable than those committed at arm's length. I am most concerned with American obstacles to peace because I am an American.

War, Atrocities Committed, Asking

I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.

Commitment, Thinking, Agriculture

Source: www.neh.gov

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.

Prayer, Lying, Heart

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

The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.

Ignorance, Knowledge, Acquisition

Wendell Berry (2011). “Standing by Words: Essays”, p.56, Counterpoint Press

The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

Running, Long, Mountain

Wendell Berry's Commencement Address at Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Kentucky, May 14, 2005.

Today, local economies are being destroyed by the 'pluralistic,' displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.

Principles, Today, Sake

New Perspectives Quarterly, www.poetryfoundation.org. 1992.

Give your approval to all you cannot understand.

Giving, Approval

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

If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another "until death," are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them.

Thinking, Law, Giving

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.

Government, Citizens, Principles

Wendell Berry (2012). “The Long-Legged House”, p.27, Counterpoint Press

An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

Art, Scar, Geography

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.7, Counterpoint Press

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.

Sheep, Nurse, Barns

Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!

Errors, Long, Stupidity

Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stanley, David Loy, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim (2013). “Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth”, p.80, The Golden Sufi Center

Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.

Self, Restraint, Killjoy

Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free and should be encouraged to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.

Running, Long, Suits

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.266, Counterpoint

The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.

Taken, Agriculture, Individuality

Wendell Berry (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.45, Counterpoint Press

The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves.

People, Survival, Important

Wendell Berry (2009). “The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry”, p.155, Counterpoint Press

There are two laws that we had better take to be absolute. The first is that as we cannot exempt ourselves from living in this world, then if we wish to live, we cannot exempt ourselves from using the world. If we cannot exempt ourselves from use, then we must deal with the issues raised by use. And so the second law is that if we want to continue living, we cannot exempt use from care.

Inspiring, Law, Two

The 'environmental crisis' has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of 'raw materials,' and that we may safely possess those materials by taking them.... And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as 'environmental' problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them.

Inspiring, Simple, Years

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.178, Counterpoint Press

If in the human economy, a squash in the field is worth more than a bushel of soil, that does not mean that food is more valuable than soil; it means simply that we do not know how to value the soil. In its complexity and its potential longevity, the soil exceeds our comprehension; we do not know how to place a just market value on it, and we will never learn how. Its value is inestimable; we must value it, beyond whatever price we put on it, by respecting it.

Mean, Land, Squash

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.

Husband, Wind, Land

These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.

Mean, People, Justice

The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.

Land, People, Essentials

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