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Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 8

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

I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.

I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.

Believe, Land, Air

Source: www.neh.gov

If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.

Environmental, Sustainability, Endure

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.136, Counterpoint Press

I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.

Thinking, Issues, Promise

Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stanley, David Loy, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim (2013). “Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth”, p.79, The Golden Sufi Center

The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.

Community, Affluence

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.59, Counterpoint

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?

Children, Mean, Compassion

Wendell Berry (2005). “Hannah Coulter: A Novel”, p.168, Counterpoint Press

Physical health doesn't exist apart from the health of other things. Health ultimately involves the community, and the community ultimately involves the place and natural life of that place, so that real health is harmony with the world.

Real, Community, World

It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.

Miracle, Germs, Poison

Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.

Betrayal, Stupid, Responsibility

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

But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free.

Fall, Cutting, Roots

Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.130, Counterpoint Press

If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.

Christian, Taken, Past

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.

Prayer, Love Life, Garden

O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.

Dark, Garden, Light

Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.242, Counterpoint Press

And having thoughtlessly polluted our streams and rivers, we have seen in recent years a rapidly growing market for bottled drinking water. I am sure that some will say that a rapidly growing market for water is "good for the economy," and most of us are still affluent enough to pay the cost. Nevertheless, it is a considerable cost that we are now paying for drinkable water, which we once had in plentiful supply at little cost or none at all. And the increasing of the cost suggests that the time may come when the cost will be unaffordable.

Drinking, Years, Rivers

Wendell Berry, Daniel Kemmis, Courtney White (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.147, Counterpoint Press

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

Inspiring, Reality, Agriculture

Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.286, ReadHowYouWant.com

[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy. (pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America")

Order, Sweat, America

The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.

Garden, Stills

Wendell Berry (2013). “This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 1979 - 2012”, p.203, Counterpoint

It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don't love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.

Mind, Failing

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

We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods.

Responsibility, Government, Together Again

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

War, Dark, Winter

Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.122, Counterpoint Press

When humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals: Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.

Animal, Differences, Limits

...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.

Men, Young, Knows

We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

Abuse, Energy, Fuel

Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.20, Counterpoint

A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

Food, World, Consciousness

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.326, Counterpoint

People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities.

People, Community, Needs

We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.

Land, Flags, Environment

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.73, Counterpoint

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