Wendell Berry: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.”

“The Earth is what we all have in common.”

“In solitude, we lose our loneliness.”

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

“The poem is important, but
not more than the people
whose survival it serves…”

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

“Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.”

“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.”

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

“We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.”

“The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.”

“Sit and be still
until in the time
of no rain you hear
beneath the dry wind's
commotion in the trees
the sound of flowing
water among the rocks,
a stream unheard before,
and you are where
breathing is prayer.”

“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.”

“I'm not a Baptist in any formal way. I go to the Baptist church, where my wife plays the piano, on days of bad weather. On days of good weather, I ramble off into the woods somewhere. I am a person who takes the Gospel seriously, but I have had trouble conforming my thoughts to a denomination.”

“Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.”

“Small creatures die because
larger creatures are hungry.
How superior to this
human confusion of greed
and creed, blood and fire.”

“What could be more absurd, to begin with, than our attitude of high moral outrage against other nations for manufacturing the selfsame weapons that we manufacture? The difference, as our leaders say, is that we will use these weapons virtuously, whereas our enemies will use them maliciously — a proposition that too readily conforms to a proposition of much less dignity: we will use them in our interest, whereas our enemies will use them in theirs.”

“An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.”

“Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.”