Quotes by Wendell Berry

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.”

“The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.”

“You think winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.”

“Time doesn't stop. Your life doesn't stop and wait until you get ready to start living it.”

“He was lonely because he could imagine himself as anything but himself and as anywhere but where he was. His competitiveness and self-centeredness cut him off from any thought of shared life. He wa...”

“How joyful to be together, aloneas when we first were joinedin our little house by the riverlong ago, except that now we knoweach other, as we did not then;and now instead of two stories fumblingto...”

“A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness,...”

“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.”

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

“I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see...”

“Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it. Love, after all, 'hopeth all ...”

“[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight....”

“Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because th...”

“How to be a Poet (to remind myself)Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration work, growing older...”

“Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.”