Quotes by Wendell Berry With Free Shareable Pictures

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.

Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.

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

Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.

The earth is what we all have in common.

It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.

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.

We're trying to give the young people something that can help them, and we don't know exactly what it ought to be.

Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air.

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

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.

One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

But we didn't speak of what was bothering us the most. Maybe we didn't need to. It couldn't have been 'talked out.' It had to be worn out.

Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.

Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world's beauty and abundance.

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

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.

The world is whole beyond human knowing.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

I've had a good life, and was born to and among people I've admired and loved.

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.

Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch.

A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives.

I believe that the community -- in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures -- is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.

Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.

All times, we assume, are different; we therefore have nothing to learn from our elders, nothing to teach our children. Civilization is thus reduced to a sequence of last-minute improvisations, desperately building today out of the wreckage of yesterday.

There's a world of difference ... between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.

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

Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure).

If you eat, you are involved in agriculture.

Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.

It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed.

A woman in a tailored suit is sitting with a legal pad on her lap... The businesswoman is austerely tailored and coiffured; her eye-glasses are severe... her taste and bearing are splendid. She is impeccable.

Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.

We live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory.

To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.

It was no thought or word that called culture into being, but a
tool or a weapon. After the stone axe we needed song and story
to remember innocence, to record effect- and so to describe
the limits, to say what can be done without damage.

The only sustainable city -- and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal -- is a city in balance with its countryside.

We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare -- warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.

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

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.

To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.

The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

They were not going to live again in a time like that.

The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.

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.

You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.

Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.

I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.

Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.

The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

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.

Our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land.

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 discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.

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.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

The Earth is what we all have in common.

It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.

We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve-both the living human community in its natural household or neighborhood and the precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit.

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.

The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.

Long live gravity! Long live

stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces

of fantasy capitalism!

Another place!
it's enough to grieve me --
that old dream of going, of becoming a better man
just by getting up and going
to a better place.

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.

The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare -- warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody's enemy.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.

If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as a matter of course. I don't know what you'd call the result -- probably not capitalism or socialism.

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.

Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.

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.

To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence -- that is to wish to preserve all of its humble house -- holds and neighbourhoods.

A well-made sentence, I think, is a thing of beauty.

Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.

My label is just good farming, which isn't something you can put on a t-shirt.

When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.

Specialization is the great evil of civilization.

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.

The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.

And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.

I'm a writer more than I am a talker.

All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.

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

We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.

We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.

We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.

Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.

Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma.

You see, we don't have enough sense to make these decisions. Somehow, you just get led to where you're supposed to be, if you're willing to submit.

There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.

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.

We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I'm complicit in the things that I'm trying to oppose.

We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

It's mighty hard right now to think of anything that's precious that isn't endangered. There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.

We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

Do not tax your life with forethought of grief.

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

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

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

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.

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

You mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks. I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, ...but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else.

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.

Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.

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.

Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens.

A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

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

When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.

For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.

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.

I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won't live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines.

The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.

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.

When the mind's an empty room

The clear days come.

The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.

A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.

We live the given life, and not the planned.

An agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking and good eating.

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.

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.

The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

And if we ask what are the cultural resources that can inform and sustain a proper creaturely and stewardly awareness of the lives in a farmer's keeping, I believe that we will find them gathered under the heading of husbandry.

Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.

I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.

Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.

I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.

So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

You're making the grant of affection, forbearance, mercy, out of your own experience and, of course, out of cultural tradition. You're saying, to use the well-worn analogy, if I love my children, that puts me under obligation to assume that other people love theirs.

Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.

But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life.

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.

All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.

A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.

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

Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.

Analogies have tied things together for me, personally. The fundamental one for me is the analogy between your relationship to your spouse and your relationship to your place. Both need to be a settled commitment and both involve continuous learning and adjusting.

Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.

We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground, and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife? As a conservative, I do abhor it.

I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it's environment. The environment is in you. It's passing through you. You're breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.

The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest. In the cleared fields where he gardens and pastures his horses it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences.