Wendell Berry Quotes
Willing to die you give up your will; keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.
It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.
If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.
The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.
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're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
People who want to see the beauty of nature from motorboats and automobiles would obviously be just as pleased, and as fully recreated, at a drive-in movie.
What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.
To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.
I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.
So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.
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
If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
The old and honorable idea of 'vocation' is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.
I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men.
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
An agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking & good eating
Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.
It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.
The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.
The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.
Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!
We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody's enemy.
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.
There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.
One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.
