Wendell Berry Quotes

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.

For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.

These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.

The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.

All right, every day ain't going to be the best day of your life, don't worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.

A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

The promoters of the global economy...see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.

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

To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.

The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

What can't be helped must be endured.

It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.

If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.

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.

People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities.

...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.

A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.

Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.

The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.

At night make me one with the darkness In the morning make me one with the light.

Don't pray for the rain to stop; pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.

One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.

The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.

There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.

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

The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.

We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.

The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed

I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.

We live the given life, and not the planned.

There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.

...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.

What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?

In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.

We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.

If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?

If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.