Wendell Berry citations

Page 4

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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")”

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