Wendell Berry Quotes

You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.

The language that reveals also obscures.

It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.

I'd rather rely on mother nature's wisdom than man's cleverness

In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.

We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.

We live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory.

If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.

Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.

Love changes, and in change is true.

In losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.

Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.

So friends, every day do something that won't compute.

There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.

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.

To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.

Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.

To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.

We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.

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

Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.

The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

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

The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.

To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.

Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.

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

Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.

Our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land

There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

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.

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

When the mind's an empty room The clear days come.

You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.

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.