Wendell Berry: Trending quotes

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Wendell Berry: 378 quotes7 likes

“The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

“This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part "the free world" seems to be regarding it as merely normal.”

Source: Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food

“What can't be helped must be endured.”

Source: Jayber Crow

“and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.”

“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.”

Source: Sabbaths

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

Source: Another Turn of the Crank

“He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.”

Source: Jayber Crow

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

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

Source: Given

“The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.”

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

Source: Jayber Crow

“What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?”

“A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.”

“You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.”

Source: Jayber Crow

“The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.”

Source: What Are People For?

“Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.”

“The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.”

Source: Jayber Crow

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.”

“We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.
(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")”

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.”

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