Wendell Berry Quotes
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.
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.
If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of 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.
We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.
Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.
Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato
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.
The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.
Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.
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.
It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don't love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.
It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.
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.
For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.
When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.
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 man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.
I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.
He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
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.
Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.
You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough
We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.
In losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.
