Wendell Berry Quotes

Wendell Berry (27)

Birth:	5th August, 1934
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Critic, Farmer

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Today's Anniversary - 18th June

Births

• 1939 - Lou Brock
• 1903 - Raymond Radiguet
• 1942 - Thabo Mbeki
• 1942 - Paul McCartney
• 1913 - Sammy Cahn

Deaths

• 1880 - John Sutter
• 2009 - Ali Akbar Khan
• 1964 - Giorgio Morandi
• 1979 - Sigmund Graff
• 1982 - John Cheever

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Wisdom

  Tags in Escape, Strive

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

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Dream

  Tags in Soil
• 

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

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Cherish, Hope, Survival

• If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we ‘know’ that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Devotion, Capable, Capacity

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

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Argument, Dawn

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Tax, Wild

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Climbed, Shadow