Wendell Berry Quotes

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may...

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

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are no...

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in...

Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land un...

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

The Earth is what we all have in common.

From the union of power and money,from the union of power and secrecy,from the union of government a...

As I age in the world it will rise and spread,and be for this place horizonand orison, the voice of ...

The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved ...

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard...

A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibili...

Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps...

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in ...

People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, g...

There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choos...

No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called...

Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in i...

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has ...

A purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms. Virtue, like harmony, cannot exist alone; a virtue...

...the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing respo...

It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in thi...

While the government is "studying" and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done...

We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and ...

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who kno...

The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment" -- that is,...

The soul, in its loneliness, hopes only for "salvation." And yet what is the burden of the Bible if ...

I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest...

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lov...

I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral bo...

We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the presen...

If God loves the world, might that not be proved in my own love for it? I prayed to know in my heart...

Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heard why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifi...

He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining r...

I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must...

However interesting and lovely my days were, I could get from one day to the next only by passing th...

I loved the different voices all singing one song, the various tones and qualities, the passing lift...

I finally knew... why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and bir...

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starti...

Back there in the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew ...

History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no ...

By then I wasn't just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my praye...

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beatin...

From my college courses and my reading I knew the various names that came at the end of a line of qu...

Cecelia, as with every look and gesture she let us know, was entirely at ease only in the company of...

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathere...

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

He was lonely because he could imagine himself as anything but himself and as anywhere but where he ...

It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world....

Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.

We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Someti...

But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept that limit. Of all that we feel...

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones,...

The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church...

Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifi...

I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place. The people didn't really wa...

Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave. And why not otherwise? Wouldn’t it have...

This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing...

The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the r...

This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and pla...

You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of ti...

I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurs...

You think winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten ...

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and ...

Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren a...

In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Somet...

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absen...

I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be fin...

I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn't want to be going someplace all the time for th...

Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when...

And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am th...

I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you mig...

Time doesn't stop. Your life doesn't stop and wait until you get ready to start living it.

Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, an...

And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief un...

Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of ...

How to be a Poet (to remind myself)Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upo...

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we "know" that it is. But as it registers on ou...

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming ...

I’ve come down from the skylike some damned ghost, delayedtoo long…To the abandoned fieldsthe trees ...

A tree forms itself in answerto its place and the light.Explain it how you will, the onlything expla...

the inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him,and until I wake I believeI will die of gr...

For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father's dead wrist in his hand, while his mind...

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The t...

The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship an...

Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.

How joyful to be together, aloneas when we first were joinedin our little house by the riverlong ago...

...our great modern error is the belief that we must invariably give up one thing in order to have a...

Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both d...

Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulti...

We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemploym...

Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting...

I sat down in a chair by the bed. The house got altogether still again, and I thought he was asleep....

A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is "a dispenser of ...

As Gill says, "every man is called to give love to the work of his hands. Every man is called to be ...

At every point in our food economy, present conditions remaining, we must expect to come to a time w...

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the wo...

What is the point of "labor saving" if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing po...

Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Heal...