Wendell Berry Quotes
It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.
The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.
The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.
Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.
The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.
Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in "justice" or in affirmation of "rights" or in defense of "peace" do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.
The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.
We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.
The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.
It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.
I would consider myself simply a critic of the market economy. My standard isn't primarily political. First of all, it's ecological. And then I get to matters that are social and cultural.
People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
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.
The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.
The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.
Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.
Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.
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.
Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.
A tree forms itself in answerto its place and the light.Explain it how you will, the onlything explainable will beyour explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV
the inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him, and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died.
Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone.
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.
The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.
...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.
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")
There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.
People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.
Oh Lord, make us ableTo eat all that's on this table, And if there's some we haven't gotBring it to us while it's hot
And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.
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.
The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten.
When I rise uplet me rise up joyfullike a bird.When I falllet me fall without regretlike a leaf.
The crisis of community has its source in the corruption of character.
What is the point of "labor saving" if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? (Health is Membership, pg. 93)
Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98)
The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. (pg. 260, The Idea of a Local Economy)