Best 536 quotes of Wendell Berry on MyQuotes

A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.

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

Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.

A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written.

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.

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.

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.

Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time.

A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.

All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.

All right, every day ain't going to be the best day of your life, don't worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.

[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy. (pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America")

All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.

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.

A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.

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.

An agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking & good eating

Analogies have tied things together for me, personally. The fundamental one for me is the analogy between your relationship to your spouse and your relationship to your place. Both need to be a settled commitment and both involve continuous learning and adjusting.

An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

And having thoughtlessly polluted our streams and rivers, we have seen in recent years a rapidly growing market for bottled drinking water. I am sure that some will say that a rapidly growing market for water is "good for the economy," and most of us are still affluent enough to pay the cost. Nevertheless, it is a considerable cost that we are now paying for drinkable water, which we once had in plentiful supply at little cost or none at all. And the increasing of the cost suggests that the time may come when the cost will be unaffordable.

And if we ask what are the cultural resources that can inform and sustain a proper creaturely and stewardly awareness of the lives in a farmer's keeping, I believe that we will find them gathered under the heading of husbandry.

And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly.

and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present

...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

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.

Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.

Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free and should be encouraged to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.

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.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us... What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth's ability to produce.

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 identity of community and economy. (pg. 63, "Racism and the Economy")

A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. The realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has always conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done.

As I age in the world it will rise and spread, and be for this place horizon and orison, the voice of its winds. I have made myself a dream to dream of its rising, that has gentled my nights. Let me desire and wish well the life these trees may live when I no longer rise in the mornings to be pleased with the green of them shining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them.

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

As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.

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.

As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful. We have no choice then but to become its exploiters, and to lose, by consequence, our place in it. It is only when, by humility, openness, generosity, courage, we make ourselves able to relate to it on its terms that it ceases to be alien.

As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.

At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment-everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing.

At night make me one with the darkness In the morning make me one with the light.

At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.

A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.

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

Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.