Quotes.wiki
  • Home
  • Tags
  • Authors
  • Contact Us
Quotes.wiki
Quotes.wiki
  • Home
  • Tags
  • Authors
  • Contact Us
Wendell Berry  Quotes
That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture. It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (1 votes, 5.00 ) Loading...
AgricultureDeceptionScale
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (1 votes, 3.00 ) Loading...
AgricultureConsumerismEnvironment
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors’ prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CommunityNeighborsSecurity
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
How joyful to be together, aloneas when we first were joinedin our little house by the riverlong ago, except that now we knoweach other, as we did not then;and now instead of two stories fumblingto meet, we belong to one storythat the two, joining, made. And nowwe touch each other with the tendernessof mortals, who...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
Lives-IntertwiningLoveSoulmates
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
If [the loss of fertility of the soil and the loss of soil as a renewable resource] does happen, we are familiar enough with the nature of American salesmanship to know that it will be done in the name of the starving millions, in the name of liberty, justice, democracy, and brotherhood, and to free...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
AgricultureEcologyMarketing
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
AgricultureChristSoil
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
EcologyRevolutionStewardship
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
ComplainingMeeknessVirtue
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
Death-And-DyingStorytellingTime
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
THE WILD ROSE” – BY WENDELL BERRYSometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritualI live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart.Suddenly you flare again in my sightA wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was onlyshadeAnd I am blessed and choose again,That which I...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
Poems
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
What marriage offers – and what fidelity is meant to protect – is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. Such a convergence obviously cannot be continuous. No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
FidelityMarriagePartiality
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
It is not, I think, a question of when and how the white people will “free” the black and the red people. It is a condescension to believe that we have the power to do that. Until we have recognized in them the full strength and grace of their distinctive humanity we will be able...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
FreedomHumanityRacism
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
Dance,’ they told me, and I stood still,and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.’Pray,’ they said, and I laughed,covering myself in the earth’s brightnesses,and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel,and prayed like an orphan.

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
BeautyDanceEarth
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.(pg.99, “The Body and the Earth”)

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CommunityCreationHealing
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
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...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CreationNatureRefuge
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable…. It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that “to work is to pray.” (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
JusticePrayerVocation
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars… I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.I...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
DeathEternityGrief
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsible within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CommunityCreaturesJoy
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CourageLonelinessTravel
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound. It is not just possible, it is altogether to be expected, that our society would produce conservationists who invest in...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CharacterCounter-Productive
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil,...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CultureEnergyEvolution
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
American-CultureAux-Armes-CitoyensClass-Warfare
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else’s mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one’s own place and economy.In such a society, also, our...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CommonwealthCommunityDemocracy
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance – almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it. To those who rejoice in the abundance and intricacy in Creation, this is a source of joy, as...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CreationHumanityIgnorance
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God’s dust and God’s breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
ArtArtistsCreation
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a “hypaethral book,” such as Thoreau talked about – a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
BibleCreationGod
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better,...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
HappinessMeaninglessnessPossibility
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures; they were wilderness pleasures, not greatly different from the pleasures pursued by...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
FarmersHappinessHunting
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
The modern ignorance is in people’s assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing that cannot be proved, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell . . . The next hard time is just as real to him as the last,...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
Wisdom
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CommunityHistoryLove
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
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...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
ChirstChristianityJesus
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
ChristianityCommunityMarriage
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
If God loves the world, might that not be proved in my own love for it? I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CommunityFreedomLove
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
FoodFreedom
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
ChangeFreedom
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but with the ones forsaken. The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other; it unites each of them with the community in a vow of sexual responsibility toward all others. The whole community...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
FidelityMarriageVows
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
I could not have desired her enough. She was a living soul and could be loved forever. Like every living creature, she carried in her the presence of eternity. That was why, as she grew older, I saw in her always the child she had been, and why, looking at her when she was a...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
HumanityLove
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
AdviceClutterLife
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members – among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CommonwealthCommunityIdentity
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since…I knew too that this new war was...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
EnemiesLoveWar
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanged for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future. A liberal education rests on...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
AgricultureCultureEducation
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
A tree forms itself in answerto its place and the light.Explain it how you will, the onlything explainable will beyour explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
LightPoetry
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
EatingFamilyFood
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CreationDarknessHumility
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
While the government is “studying” and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
Civic-ResponsibilityDisciplineGovernment
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
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...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
EnvironmentalismNaturePreservation
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
Creation is thus God’s presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard has written that “Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God’s hidden Being.” This means that we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate, for to every creature, the gift of life is a portion of...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CreationGodLife
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful...

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CreationGod
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
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

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
CharityCreatorGod
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

-Wendell Berry

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
Wisdom
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblr
  • Page 1 of 4
  • Next
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • About us

Quotes.wiki operates under Creative Commons license, which means we lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon our work, even commercially, as long as they credit us for the original creation.