Quotessence
Home / Authors / Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllWorldPeopleIfsKnowsEconomyHumansThinkingCommunityEnvironmentalLandNatureMayWayEarthNeedsMenCreationWaterCreaturesAgriculture

Famous Wendell Berry Quotes

“The soul, in its loneliness, hopes only for "salvation." And yet what is the burden of the Bible if not a sense of the mutuality of influence, rising out of an essential unity, among soul and body and community and world? These are all the works of God, and it is therefore the work of virtue to make or restore harmony among them. The world is certainly thought of as a place of spiritual trial, but it is also the confluence of soul and body, word and flesh, where thoughts must become deeds, where goodness must be enacted. This is the great meeting place, the narrow passage where spirit and flesh, word and world, pass into each other. The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction. It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony. What else can be meant by the resurrection of the body? The body should be "filled with light," perfected in understanding. And so everywhere there is the sense of consequence, fear and desire, grief and joy. What is desirable is repeatedly defined in the tensions of the sense of consequence.”

WisdomEarthSpiritualSpiritVirtueBibleSalvation
Book:The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Create image

“If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man's only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation. (pg.89, "Think Little")”

CareEarthNatureFreedomEconomyCreation
Book:The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Create image

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world - to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity - our own capacity for life - that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”

EarthNatureMysteryCreationHumilityWorshipAweReverence
Book:The Long-Legged House
Create image

“But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is "in." In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”

EarthNatureSocietyConsumerism
Book:The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Create image

“Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions. This split in public values produced or was accompanied by, as it was bound to be, an equally artificial and ugly division in people's lives, so that a man, while pursuing Heaven with the sublime appetite he thought of as his soul, could turn his heart against his neighbors and his hands against the world... Though Heaven is certainly more important than the earth if all they say about it is true, it is still morally incidental to it and dependent on it, and I can only imagine it and desire it in terms of what I know of the earth. (pg. 23, "A Native Hill")”

EarthHeavenNatureCreationCreator
Book:The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Create image

“The name of our proper connection to the earth is 'good work,' for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing.”

GivingArtMadeDoneEarthNamesWorkMaterialsSourceHonorConnectionsUsersGood Work
Book:Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays
Create image

“Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need more than to understand their obligation to one another and to the earth; they need also the feeling of such obligation, and the feeling can come only within the patterns of familiarity. A nation of urban nomads, such as we have become, may simply be unable to be enough disturbed by its destruction of the ecological health of the land, because the people's dependence on the land, though it has been expounded to them over and over again in general terms, is not immediate to their feelings.”

PeopleNeedsMayHas BeensEnoughFactsFeelingsEarthNationsTermLandDestructionPatternsObligationUrbanDependenceFamiliarityDisturbedEcologicalNomad
Author:Wendell Berry
Create image

“In this state of total consumerism-which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves-all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”

PeopleThinkingIdeasStatesEarthTermBrokenOffersForgottenMeaningfulContactMotiveConsumerismHelplessDependenceOverconsumption
Book:The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry
Create image

“A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us... What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth's ability to produce.”

IfsNeedsMindPersonsHomeEarthGrowsAbilityPracticeEconomyProduceGardenFundamentalsPreservesSoilExploitsMistrustNecessary Change
Author:Wendell Berry
Create image

“If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared. (pg. 59, "Racism and the Economy")”

IfsWantHumansRealEarthLife IsTurnsWaterCommunityAnimalEconomyAirSecurityCreaturesRacismSafetyPlantProsperityNeighborLocalsOppressionWorldlySincerelyHomelandGoodwillOur CommunityGood HealthPlants And Animals
Book:The Hidden Wound
Create image

“If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even as a necessary agricultural principle but as a sacred grove - a place where the Creation is let alone, to serve as instruction, example, refuge; a place for people to go, free of work and presumption, to let themselves alone. (pg. 125, The Body and the Earth)”

PeopleIfsNeedsBodyEarthFacesCultureForceNaturalPrinciplesExampleCreationSacredInstinctWoodsForestsGenerosityWildernessYieldFarmsInstructionRefugeCompetentResilientPresumptionGrove
Author:Wendell Berry
Create image

“This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.”

KnowsBookEarthLyingHeavenWaterTreeReflectionCloudsSeedsPossessedGrainFloatsCapturedCrumbsMustardThis Is A BookMustard Seed
Book:Jayber Crow: A Novel
Create image

“Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world.”

IfsThinkingWorldLooksEarthCommunitySpaceAnswersHalfTakenPhotographLocalsNeighborhoodOur CommunityOuter SpaceRight AnswersQuestions And AnswersAmish
Author:Wendell Berry
Create image

“If one accepts the 24th and 104th Psalms as scriptural norms, then surface mining and other forms of earth destruction are perversions. If we take the Gospels seriously, how can we not see industrial warfare - with its inevitable massacre of innocents - as a most shocking perversion? By the standard of all scriptures, neglect of the poor, of widows and orphans, of the sick, the homeless, the insane, is an abominable perversion.”

IfsEarthFormPoorAcceptingStandardsDestructionSickSurfaceScriptureInsaneInevitableNeglectWarfareHomelessShockingNormWidowsOrphanPerversionMiningMassacresPsalmsWidows And Orphans
Author:Wendell Berry
Create image