Wendell Berry Quotes
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Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. Wikipedia

✵ 5. August 1934  •  Other names وندل بری

Wendell Berry photo

Photographer/original uploader: David Marshall/ w:User:brtom1, Originally uploaded to the English Wikipedia as Image:Wberry.jpg / CC BY-SA 2.0

Wendell Berry: 189 quotes7 likes

Wendell Berry Quotes

“If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.”

Source: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

“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.”

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“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.”

Citizenship Papers (2003), A Citizen's Response

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

"Think Little".
A Continuous Harmony (1972)

“Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.”

"Healing".
What Are People For? (1990)

“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.”

Citizenship Papers (2003), The Failure of War

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

"The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment" in The Country of Marriage (1973).
Poems

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

"A Poem of Difficult Hope".
What Are People For? (1990)

“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.”

"Imagination in Place".
The Way of Ignorance (2005)

“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.”

Given (2005), Sabbaths 2001

“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.”

"The Landscaping of Hell : Strip-Mine Morality" (1965).
The Long-Legged House (1969)

“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.”

The Brian Lehrer Show (17 October 2013) http://www.wnyc.org/story/wendell-berry/

“Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.”

Life Is A Miracle : An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000)

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

Given (2005), Sabbaths 2001

“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.”

Citizenship Papers (2003), The Failure of War

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

"Damage".
What Are People For? (1990)

“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.”

"Think Little".
A Continuous Harmony (1972)

“Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.”

"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970).
Poems

“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.”

"A Statement against the War in Vietnam".
The Long-Legged House (1969)

“The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.”

"The Loss of the Future".
The Long-Legged House (1969)

“A mind that has confronted ruin for years
Is half or more a ruined mind.”

Given (2005), Sabbaths 2001

“From the union of power and money,
from the union of power and secrecy,
from the union of government and science,
from the union of government and art,
from the union of science and money,
from the union of ambition and ignorance,
from the union of genius and war,
from the union of outer space and inner vacuity,
the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.”

"The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union" in Entries (1997).
Poems

“Our century of war, militarism, and political terror has produced great — and successful — advocates of true peace, among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount examples. The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary sacrifices.”

Citizenship Papers (2003), The Failure of War

“If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.”

Citizenship Papers (2003), A Citizen's Response

“What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.”

"A Poem of Difficult Hope".
What Are People For? (1990)

“Today, local economies are being destroyed by the "pluralistic," displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.”

Interview in New Perspectives Quarterly (1992), quoted in his Profile at The Poetry Foundation http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=540

“Poetry can be written only because it has been written.”

"The Responsibility of the Poet".
What Are People For? (1990)

“The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert … a man with a machine and inadequate culture … is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.”

"Damage".
What Are People For? (1990)

“If you know even as little history as I do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any problem except that of retribution — the “justice” of exchanging one damage for another.”

Citizenship Papers (2003), The Failure of War

“Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium.”

"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970).
Poems

“Let me say
and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.”

The Silence.
Poems

“There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.”

Comment at City Arts & Lecture Series, Herbst Theater, San Francisco, CA; 29 October 2012 http://thirtythreadbaremercies.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/the-mad-farmer-lives-a-night-with-wendell-berry/#

“The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.”

"Peaceableness Toward Enemies".
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (1993)

“In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known.”

"Imagination in Place".
The Way of Ignorance (2005)

“I think we must be careful about too easily accepting, or being too easily grateful for, sacrifices made by others, especially if we have made none ourselves.”

Citizenship Papers (2003), The Failure of War

“The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.”

"Healing".
What Are People For? (1990)

“Much of the obscurity of our effort so far against terrorism originates in the now official idea that the enemy is evil and that we are (therefore) good, which is the precise mirror image of the official idea of the terrorists.”

Citizenship Papers (2003), A Citizen's Response

“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.”

"Health is Membership".
Another Turn of the Crank (1996)

“We are living even now among punishments and ruins.”

"A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey".
What Are People For? (1990)

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

"Think Little".
A Continuous Harmony (1972)

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

Citizenship Papers (2003), A Citizen's Response

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

"Imagination in Place"
The Way of Ignorance (2005)

“To farm is to be placed absolutely.”

"Imagination in Place".
The Way of Ignorance (2005)

“On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by failing or subsidy-dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we have erected the tottering tower of "agribusiness," which prospers and "feeds the world" (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining its own foundations.”

Citizenship Papers (2003), A Citizen's Response

“There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, “It is yet more difficult than you thought.” This is the muse of form. The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap-energy civilization, in which “economic health” depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. To hear the second muse one must move outside the cheap-energy enclosure. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.”

Standing by Words: Essays (2011), Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms (1982)

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us... We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”

"A Native Hill"
The Long-Legged House (1969)

“It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. 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. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

Standing by Words: Essays (2011), Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms (1982)

“As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.”

"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970)
Poems

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