Quotes from Wendell Berry

The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend.

The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in mariage. My grandfather made a peace here that has joined many who would otherwise have been divided. I am the child of his forgiveness.

Back there in the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever. And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time.

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.   In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.   In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.

The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven. The great aim of modern life has been to improve the future—or even just to reach the future, assuming that the future will inevitably be "better.

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't.

He had nothing he could do with is life's work now except leave it to a man who thought nothing of it.

He was a humorous, good-natured man, maybe because he hoped for little and expected less and took his satisfactions where he found them.

I loved the different voices all singing one song, the various tones and qualities, the passing lifts of feeling, rising up and going out forever. Old Man Profet, who was a different man on Sunday, used to draw out the notes at the ends of verses so he could listen to himself, and in fact it sounded pretty.

Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone.

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts...

The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else.

The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend. Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by Your will, not ours. And it is fit Our only choice should be to die Into that rest, or out of it.

It's sad that we live in a society that has the refrain 'thank God it's Friday, that means you despise 5/7ths of your life.

I will purge my mind of the airy claims of church and state, and observe the ancient wisdom of tribesman and peasant, who understood they labored on the earth only to lie down in it in peace, and were content. I will serve the earth and not pretend my life could be better served.

I am wholly willing to be here, Between the bright silent thousands of stars And the life of the grass pouring out of the ground. The hill has grown to me like a foot. Until I lift the Earth, I cannot move.

A man ought to study the wilderness of a place before applying to it the ways he learned in another place.

There can be no such thing as a "global village." No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.

We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.

A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied.

I never again would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away.

I became a sort of garden fanatic, and I am not over it yet. You can take a few seed peas, dry and dead, and sow them in a little furrow, and they will sprout into a row of pea vines and bear more peas—it may not be a miracle, but that is a matter of opinion.