Authors:

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 5

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

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

Enough, Thorough, Radical

Wendell Berry (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.21, Counterpoint Press

Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.

Having Hope, Harder, Hard

The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.

Freedom, Fall, Rain

Wendell Berry (2009). “The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry”, p.136, Counterpoint Press

There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.

Journey, Feet, Hiking

I have always loved a window, especially an open one.

Window

Wendell Berry (2001). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, p.185, Counterpoint Press

The language that reveals also obscures.

Language

Wendell Berry, Daniel Kemmis, Courtney White (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.130, Counterpoint Press

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

Freedom, Heart, Thinking

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.62, Counterpoint Press

Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world's beauty and abundance.

Delight, World, Helping

To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

Heart, Mad, Brain

Wendell Berry, Morris Allen Grubbs (2007). “Conversations with Wendell Berry”, p.16, Univ. Press of Mississippi

There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

Inspiring, Country, Flags

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.127, Counterpoint

Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households.

Community, Heaven, Soul

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.319, Counterpoint

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.

Believe, Ignorance, Weakness

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.114, Counterpoint Press

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.

War, Development, World

Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.85, ReadHowYouWant.com

Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.

Hands, Action, Responsible

Wendell Berry (2011). “Standing by Words”, p.61, Counterpoint Press

The reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it. We need wilderness of all kinds, large and small, public and private. Wee need to go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the presence of the unqualified and mysterious formality of Creation.

Needs, Unqualified, Mysterious

We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

Children, Ocean, Lakes

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.188, Counterpoint Press

Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need more than to understand their obligation to one another and to the earth; they need also the feeling of such obligation, and the feeling can come only within the patterns of familiarity. A nation of urban nomads, such as we have become, may simply be unable to be enough disturbed by its destruction of the ecological health of the land, because the people's dependence on the land, though it has been expounded to them over and over again in general terms, is not immediate to their feelings.

Land, People, Feelings

Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

Gratitude, Food, Ignorance

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.152, Counterpoint

If you grow a garden you are going to shed some sweat, and you are going to spend some time bent over; you will experience some aches and pains. But it is in the willingness to accept this discomfort that we strike the most telling blow against the power plants and what they represent.

Time, Pain, Acceptance

Without a complex knowledge of one's place and without the faithfulness to one's place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or "in" group.

Country, May, Groups

Wendell Berry (2012). “A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural”, p.66, Counterpoint Press

We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.

Retirement, Ambition, Weekend

Wendell Berry (2009). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food”, p.36, Counterpoint Press

Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty. We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

Sleep, Dark, Love Is

Wendell Berry (2013). “A Country of Marriage: Poems”, p.11, Counterpoint Press

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.

Book, Thinking, Giving

Wendell Berry (1993). “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays”, Pantheon

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

Tasks, Nevertheless, Whole

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

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

Spiritual, Loneliness, Food

You May Also Like: