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Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 9

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 living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life.

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

Light, People, Shining

Wendell Berry (2005). “Hannah Coulter: A Novel”, p.57, Counterpoint Press

As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.

Technology, People, Political

Wendell Berry (2011). “Standing by Words”, p.58, Counterpoint Press

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.

Two, Years, Tree

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

But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it.

Self, Greed, Lazy

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.159, Counterpoint Press

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

Party, Lines, Uniforms

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.84, Counterpoint

One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.

Christian, War, Feelings

Wendell Berry (2005). “Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings about Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness”, p.4, Counterpoint Press

The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air access remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

Military, Independent, Technology

Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.16, Counterpoint

A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

Men, Culture, Machines

Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.8, Counterpoint Press

Love changes, and in change is true.

Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.299, Counterpoint Press

The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986)

People, Mind, Defense

What can't be helped must be endured.

Wendell Berry (2001). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, p.169, Counterpoint Press

Especially among Christians in positions of wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus' commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective "Christian".

Christian, Jesus, Reading

Wendell Berry (2005). “Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings about Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness”, p.3, Counterpoint Press

We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.

World, Care, Willing

"Segment: Wendell Berry on His Hopes for Humanity". "Moyers&Company" with Bill Moyers, billmoyers.com. November 29, 2013.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

Heart, Scare, Paper

Wendell Berry (2012). “It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays”, p.28, Counterpoint

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

Commitment, People, Principles

Under the discipline of unity, knowledge and morality come together. No longer can we have that paltry 'objective' knowledge so prized by the academic specialists. To know anything at all becomes a moral predicament. Aware that there is no such thing as a specialized effect, one becomes responsible for judgments as well as facts. Aware that as an agricultural scientist he had 'one great subject,' Sir Albert Howard could no longer ask, What can I do with what I know? without at the same time asking, How can I be responsible for what I know?

Discipline, Unity, Together

Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.43, Counterpoint

When you have large-scale legitimated violence in a place that is divided as profoundly and bitterly as Kentucky was, the legitimate violence can cause illegitimate violence, a terrible local heartlessness and cruelty that feeds on itself and goes on and on.

Kentucky, Violence, Causes

Source: www.neh.gov

If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even as a necessary agricultural principle but as a sacred grove - a place where the Creation is let alone, to serve as instruction, example, refuge; a place for people to go, free of work and presumption, to let themselves alone. (pg. 125, The Body and the Earth)

Yield, People, Generosity

I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.

Tree, Shapes, Way

Source: www.neh.gov

Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.

Clouds, Silence, Tree

Wendell Berry (2013). “This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 1979 - 2012”, p.219, Counterpoint

Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.

Stars, Loneliness, Night

Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.

Effort, Doe, Charity

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.

Forests, Harvest, Plant

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

Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens.

Air, Battle, Wire

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

Men, Thinking, Kind

Wendell Berry (2009). “A Place on Earth”, p.180, Counterpoint

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