Quotes from Wendell Berry

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.

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

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.

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

The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.

If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race

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

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.

The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.

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.

I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.

Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.

Our Constitution, by its separation of powers and its system of checks and balances, acts as a restraint upon efficiency by denying exclusive power to any branch of government. The logic of governmental efficiency, unchecked, runs straight on, not only to dictatorship, but also to torture, assassination, and other abominations.

One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.

Much of the obscurity of our effort so far against terrorism originates in the now official idea that the enemy is evil and that we are (therefore) good, which is the precise mirror image of the official idea of the terrorists.

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 have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.

And find that dark, too blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet, and dark wings.

We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

Small creatures die because larger creatures are hungry. How superior to this human confusion of greed and creed, blood and fire.