Wendell Berry famous quotes

We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?
-- Wendell Berry

#Want #Succeed #Doe

The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
-- Wendell Berry

#Moving #Technology #Hands

People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
-- Wendell Berry

#Inspiring #People #Attention

Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.
-- Wendell Berry

#People #Mind #Corn

Be joyful because it is humanly possible.
-- Wendell Berry

#Joyful

Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.
-- Wendell Berry

#Animal #Mind #Essentials

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One's inner voices become audible... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.
-- Wendell Berry

#Voice #Solitude #Found

The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.
-- Wendell Berry

#Land #Fertility #Maintenance

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

#Garden #Stills

You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.
-- Wendell Berry

#Support #Kind

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
-- Wendell Berry

#Loneliness #Voice #Solitude

You've got to reach towards a better language, and you're not going to make it up from scratch; you've got to reach back into the tradition. Western tradition is not as impoverished as a lot of people would like to think, but you'd have to go back before the industrial revolution; you may have to go back farther than that. Of course, the Bible has a perfectly adequate language, but it's suffered a lot of thoughtless wear.
-- Wendell Berry

#Thinking #People #Adequate

Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
-- Wendell Berry

#Law #Justice #Competition

The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
-- Wendell Berry

#Jobs #People #Entrepreneur

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.
-- Wendell Berry

#War #Sacrifice #People

Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
-- Wendell Berry

#Practice #Let It Go #Matter

The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.
-- Wendell Berry

#Distance #Wine #Air

Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma.
-- Wendell Berry

#Depressing #People #Levels

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)
-- Wendell Berry

#People #Mind #Garbage

There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.
-- Wendell Berry

#Growth #Fuel #Economy

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
-- Wendell Berry

#Sea #Fishing #Rivers

American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.
-- Wendell Berry

#Agriculture #Diversity #Needs

It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'
-- Wendell Berry

#Agriculture #Understanding #Agribusiness

I dream of a quiet man / who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows / where the rarest wildflowers / are blooming, and who goes, / and finds that he is smiling / not by his own will.
-- Wendell Berry

#Dream #Men #Blooming

I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.
-- Wendell Berry

#Animal #Water #Tree

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.
-- Wendell Berry

#Independent #Garden #Thinking

The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
-- Wendell Berry

#Agriculture #Genius #Principles

Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.
-- Wendell Berry

#Animal #Two #Water

Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
-- Wendell Berry

#Want #Schedules #Unexpected

We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
-- Wendell Berry

#Effort #World #Would Be

People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
-- Wendell Berry

#Jobs #People #Machines

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
-- Wendell Berry

#Nature #Memories #Party

People are always talking about the first church. The real first church was that gaggle of people who followed Jesus around. We don't know anything about them. But he apparently didn't ask them what creed they subscribed to, or what their sexual preference was, or any of that. He fed them. He healed them. He forgave them. He is clear about sin, but he was also for forgiveness.
-- Wendell Berry

#Jesus #Real #Talking

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
-- Wendell Berry

#Nature #Responsibility #Garden

There is a religious principle: Love thy neighbour as thyself. But it's also an economic asset. If you've got a neighbour, you've got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbours, you can't have a limitless growth economy. You have to prefer to have a neighbour rather than to own your neighbour farm.
-- Wendell Berry

#Religious #Growth #Principles

Categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob. It makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob, a mob overflowing with righteousness – as at the crucifixion and before and since. This can happen only after we have made a categorical refusal to kindness: to heretics, foreigners, enemies or any other group different from ourselves.
-- Wendell Berry

#Religious #Kindness #Hatred

To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.
-- Wendell Berry

#Land #Limits #Use

I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)
-- Wendell Berry

#Believe #Community #Membership

The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
-- Wendell Berry

#Land #People #Connections

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
-- Wendell Berry

#Numbers #Corporations #Moral

The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.
-- Wendell Berry

#Art #Lasts #Example

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

#Fire #House #Relieved

Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.
-- Wendell Berry

#Country #Powerful #People

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred,
-- Wendell Berry

#Hatred #Cold Hearted #Abstract

My label is just "good farming", which isn't something you can put on a t-shirt.
-- Wendell Berry

#Labels #T Shirt #Farming

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
-- Wendell Berry

#People #Wish #Division

Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
-- Wendell Berry

#Civilization #Evil #Specialization

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-- Wendell Berry

#Grief #Worry #Grace

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.
-- Wendell Berry

#Love #Dark #Shining

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
-- Wendell Berry

#Spiritual #Home #Journey

I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.
-- Wendell Berry

#Unique #Expectations #Miracle

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.
-- Wendell Berry

#Lonely #Hate #People

It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.
-- Wendell Berry

#Thinking #Government #Needs

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.
-- Wendell Berry

#Land #Space #Water

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
-- Wendell Berry

#Nature #Garden #Earth Day

It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
-- Wendell Berry

#Real #Journey #Mind

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.
-- Wendell Berry

#Self #Greed #Lazy

The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
-- Wendell Berry

#Mean #Community #Political

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.
-- Wendell Berry

#Effort #Charity #Doe

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.
-- Wendell Berry

#Years #Two #Tree

Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
-- Wendell Berry

#Practice #Track #Foxes

Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
-- Wendell Berry

#Challenges #Feelings #Risk

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.
-- Wendell Berry

#Believe #World #God Love

You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
-- Wendell Berry

#Giving #Wish #Want

We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.
-- Wendell Berry

#Race #Quality #Identity

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
-- Wendell Berry

#Answers #Plant

The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
-- Wendell Berry

#Land #Community #Care

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-- Wendell Berry

#Grace #World

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

#Enough #Thorough #Radical

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

#Christian #War #Feelings

A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.
-- Wendell Berry

#Community #Helping #Economy

If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?
-- Wendell Berry

#Imagination #Needs #Novel

Our Children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience, or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water come from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.
-- Wendell Berry

#Nature #Children #Book

I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
-- Wendell Berry

#Grief #Believe #Forever

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

#Window

When despair for the world grows in me... I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-- Wendell Berry

#Stars #Light #Water

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

#Tasks

It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.
-- Wendell Berry

#Jesus #Born

In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.
-- Wendell Berry

#Flesh #World #Healthcare

It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
-- Wendell Berry

#Nature #Humility #Able

Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)
-- Wendell Berry

#Grace #Comfort #World

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.
-- Wendell Berry

#Teacher #Wanted #Learners

There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.
-- Wendell Berry

#Littles #Layers #Sitting

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
-- Wendell Berry

#Community #Age #Care

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.
-- Wendell Berry

#Inspiring #Country #Flags

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
-- Wendell Berry

#Hurt #Grief #Believe

We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.
-- Wendell Berry

#War #Needs #Excess

They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.
-- Wendell Berry

#Beautiful #World #Opinion

Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.
-- Wendell Berry

You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough
-- Wendell Berry

#Environment #Plant

It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams. Or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around.
-- Wendell Berry

#Animal #Hamburgers #Rooms

I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children.
-- Wendell Berry

#Nature #Children #Father

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use.
-- Wendell Berry

#Home #School #Air

Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.
-- Wendell Berry

#Dream #Love You #Live Your Life

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.
-- Wendell Berry

#Death #Long #Healthy

If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.
-- Wendell Berry

#Winning #Assumption #Conversation

The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.
-- Wendell Berry

#Book #Writing #Earth

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

#World #Consciousness #Eating

I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.
-- Wendell Berry

#Country #Thinking #Cities

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world.
-- Wendell Berry

#Taken #Thinking #Space