Wendell Berry: Trending quotes (page 5)

“One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”

“When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.”

“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.”

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

“I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.”

“Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.”

“It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.”

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

“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”

“After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.”

“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.”

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

“If the devil doesn't exist… how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?”

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

“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.”

“The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.”

“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. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)”

“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.”

“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.”