Wendell Berry: Trending quotes

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Wendell Berry: 378 quotes7 likes

“… 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.”

Wendell Berry

Variant: 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 hope.
Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“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.”

Wendell Berry

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

Wendell Berry

“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.”

Wendell Berry

Source: Jayber Crow

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

Wendell Berry

Source: What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

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

Wendell Berry

Source: Jayber Crow

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

Wendell Berry

Source: Jayber Crow

“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.”

Wendell Berry

Source: The Collected Poems, 1957-1982

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

Wendell Berry

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“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.”

Wendell Berry

“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.”

Wendell Berry

Source: Jayber Crow

“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.”

Wendell Berry

Source: Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

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

Wendell Berry

Source: Jayber Crow

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

Wendell Berry

Source: Jayber Crow

“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.”

Wendell Berry

Source: The Long-Legged House

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

Wendell Berry

Source: Jayber Crow

“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)”

Wendell Berry

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“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.”

Wendell Berry

"A Poem of Difficult Hope".
Source: What Are People For? (1990)
Context: Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. 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.”

Wendell Berry

Source: Jayber Crow