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Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry Quotes

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Famous Wendell Berry Quotes

“Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.”

YearsTwoTreeReturnThousandPlantProfitForestsInchesThousand YearsHarvestCropsMoldMillennium
Book:A Country of Marriage: Poems
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“The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”

MeanPoliticalCommunityNaturalWealthEnemyEconomyDemocracyFoundationPracticalsLocalsNeighborhoodHouseholdAlignmentPolitical PowerCommonwealthLocality
Book:The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry
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“Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.”

WayMindLyingLosesPracticeFieldsMarkTrackShadeResurrectionSwearFoxesTrailsLapAllegianceWrong Direction
Author:Wendell Berry
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“We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.”

FeelsHumansFoundVoiceLosesLonelinessSourceSolitudeCreaturesConsequenceOneselfAttractionObligationIntimateCommunionInner VoiceWild Places
Book:What Are People For?: Essays
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“I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle... Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, And the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song.”

StillsLyingSongLeftWaterTreeQuietTasksSightCirclesLeaving MeStirringCattle
Book:A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997
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“Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'”

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Book:What Are People For?: Essays
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“Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, "to the least of these my brethren." Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.”

LoveDoeDesireUniverseNationsLove IsStreetsFieldsPlanetsInstitutionsHumbleProfessionAbstractWillingnessHeroicCompelledLiliesBrethrenSparrows
Author:Wendell Berry
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“You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.”

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Book:Jayber Crow: A Novel
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“We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.”

IfsWorldNeedsHumansChildrenCareCultureJusticeRaceTeachPlansMountainOceanRiversOur ChildrenGood ThingsAvailableTake CareForestsDesertHuman RaceSoilLakesStewardshipImplicitMarshesGood FutureGrasslands
Book:What Are People For?: Essays
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“Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.”

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Book:The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
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“Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.”

IfsFacesResponsibilityStupidEconomicsDestructionEnvironmentalConservativeBetrayalStewardshipBlasphemyDestruction Of NatureFamily Responsibility
Book:The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry
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“In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.”

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Author:Wendell Berry
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“Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.”

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Book:The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays
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“... it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world.”

WorldIndividualGivenEnjoyCommunityNaturalEconomyOur LivesCitizensMembersEatingCrisisDrinkingEnvironmentalDestroyingSurroundingsStewardshipFamily MembersEnvironmental Crisis
Book:In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World
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“We need to confront honestly the issue of scale... You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.”

NeedsMayRunningProcessIssuesCarRaisesHonestlyScalesLocalsCorporationsChickensAirlineHogTimberLocal Food
Book:The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays
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“At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment-everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing.”

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Book:A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural
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