Selected Quotes by Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry- Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is closely identified with rural Kentucky.
He developed many of his agrarian themes in such early essays as "The Gift of Good Land" (1981) and "The Unsettling of America" (1977). His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of "Port William, such as A Place on Earth" (1967), "Jayber Crow" (2000), and "That Distant Land" (2004).
He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is also a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2014, he has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
Quotes by Wendell Berry:
“The world doesn't stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have only been on the edge of it.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“The language that reveals also obscures.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“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.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“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, Life
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“Eating is an agricultural act.”
Wendell Berry, Life
“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, Life
“I had changed, and the sign of it was only that my own death seemed to me by far the least important thing in my life.”
Wendell Berry, Life, Death
“Jesus' military career has never compelled my belief.”
Wendell Berry, Belief
“This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me.”
Wendell Berry, Belief
“Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.”
Wendell Berry, Belief
“Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.”
Wendell Berry, Belief
“...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.”
Wendell Berry, Belief
“It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“The crisis of community has its source in the corruption of character.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“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, Society
“There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“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, Society
“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, Society
“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, Society
“No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.”
Wendell Berry, Society, Freedom
“The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.”
Wendell Berry, Society, Freedom
“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, Society, Government
“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”
Wendell Berry, Society, Goals
“We’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.”
Wendell Berry, Goals
“I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.”
Wendell Berry, Goals
“When I rise up let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall let me fall without regret like a leaf.”
Wendell Berry, Goals
“He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.”
Wendell Berry, Goals
“What can't be helped must be endured.”
Wendell Berry, Goals
“There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.”
Wendell Berry, Goals
“Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”
Wendell Berry, Goals
“What I stand for is what I stand on.”
Wendell Berry, Goals
“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
Wendell Berry, Goals
“It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.”
Wendell Berry, Goals, Love
“To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.”
Wendell Berry, Intelligence/Wisdom
“The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
Wendell Berry, Intelligence/Wisdom
“To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.”
Wendell Berry, Intelligence/Wisdom
“You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.”
Wendell Berry, Intelligence/Wisdom
“Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.”
Wendell Berry, Intelligence/Wisdom
“When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.”
Wendell Berry, Intelligence/Wisdom
“He loved the woods, where it seemed to him that every life was secret, including his own.”
Wendell Berry, Nature
“He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.”
Wendell Berry, Nature
“The Earth is what we all have in common.”
Wendell Berry, Nature
“For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment, the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.”
Wendell Berry, Nature
“The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.”
Wendell Berry, Nature
“The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.”
Wendell Berry, Nature
“One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”
Wendell Berry, Nature, Life
“...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 legitimate hope.”
Wendell Berry, Nature, Goals
“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, Government, Justice
“The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.”
Wendell Berry, Power
“We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.”
Wendell Berry, Work
“If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.”
Wendell Berry, Work, Life
“The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.”
Wendell Berry, Music
“The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.”
Wendell Berry, Time, Love, Death
“The promoters of the global economy...see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.”
Wendell Berry, Business
“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
Wendell Berry, Business
“Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.”
Wendell Berry, Business, Anger and Fighting
“Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”
Wendell Berry, Hope
“I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.”
Wendell Berry, Death, Life
“Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.”
Wendell Berry, Death, Life, Love
“I have always loved a window, especially an open one.”
Wendell Berry, Happiness
“Be joyful because it is humanly possible.”
Wendell Berry, Happiness, Goals
“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
“Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.”