Wendell Berry quotes - page 2

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. (Wendell Berry)
We are living even now among punishments and ruins. View quote
Wendell Berry
We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. View quote
Wendell Berry
The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly. View quote
Wendell Berry
Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free - and should be encouraged - to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions. View quote
Wendell Berry
The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes any sense for a country - or, for that matter, a region - to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food. How can a government, entrusted with the safety and health of its people, conscientiously barter away in the name of an economic idea that people's ability to feed itself? And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free? View quote
Wendell Berry
Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world. View quote
Wendell Berry
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. View quote
Wendell Berry
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. View quote
Wendell Berry
Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established. View quote
Wendell Berry
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)
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. View quote
Wendell Berry
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. View quote
Wendell Berry
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves. View quote
Wendell Berry
Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. View quote
Wendell Berry
Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. View quote
Wendell Berry
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. View quote
Wendell Berry
The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself. View quote
Wendell Berry
The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves... View quote
Wendell Berry
Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems. View quote
Wendell Berry
A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony. (Wendell Berry)
Ask the world to reveal its quietude - not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else. View quote
Wendell Berry
To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart. View quote
Wendell Berry
What I stand for is what I stand on. View quote
Wendell Berry
In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world. View quote
Wendell Berry