Wendell Berry Quotes

Wendell Berry Quotes

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.

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.

She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry.

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.

The growth of the exploiters' revolution on this continent has been accompanied by the growth of the idea that work is beneath human dignity, particularly any form of hand work. We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from.

One thing work gives
is the joy of not working,
a minute here or there
when I stand and only breathe,
receiving the good of the air.
It comes back. Good work done
comes back into the mind,
a free breath drawn.

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

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")

What I stand for is what I stand on.

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.

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.

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.

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 world.

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.

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

A tree forms itself in answer
to its place and the light.
Explain it how you will, the only
thing explainable will be
your explanation.”
Sabbaths 1999 IV

the inlet

our friend looks as he did
when we first knew him,
and until I wake I believe
I will die of grief, for I know
that this boy grew into a man
who was a faithful friend
who died.

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.

Eating is an agricultural act.

We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.

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.

It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.

...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.

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting - the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.

When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.

It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.

Marriage has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. (from "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine")

And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

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

The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.

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.

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.

He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

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