Wendell Berry Quotes (25 Quotes)


    Like the water
    of a deep stream, love is always too much.

    I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

    And all my life I have dreaded the return
    of that year, sure that it still is
    somewhere, like a dead enemys soul.

    A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.... What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce.

    These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.


    We clasp the hands of those that go before us, And the hands of those who come after us. We enter the little circle of each other's arms And the larger circle of lovers, Whose hands are joined in a dance, And the larger circle of all creatures, Passing in and out of life, Who move also in a dance, To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it Except in fragments

    Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.


    If you grow a garden you are going to shed some sweat, and you are going to spend some time bent over you will experience some aches and pains. But it is in the willingness to accept this discomfort that we strike the most telling blow against the power plants and what they represent.

    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.


    It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.

    Whatever
    Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
    Than flesh.

    We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

    Abandon,
    as in love or sleep, holds
    them to their way, clear
    in the ancient faith: what we need
    is here.

    I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

    All right, every day ain't going to be the best day of your life, don't worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.

    Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

    If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds.... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.


    To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

    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.

    Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
    a man may be hard up to be worthy of.


    If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.


    More Wendell Berry Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Life - Nature - Love - Time - Water - World - Justice - Garden - Dreams - Music - Death & Dying - Memory - Belief & Faith - Soul - Hope - Power - Grief - Duty - Decision Making - View All Wendell Berry Quotations

    Related Authors


    John Keats - Alexander Pope - Robert Browning - Rainer Maria Rilke - Ogden Nash - Max Jacob - Geoffrey Chaucer - Euripides - Elizabeth Bishop - Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections