Quotes from Wendell Berry

We assume that we can have an exploitive, ruthlessly competitive, profit-for-profit's-sake economy, and yet remain a decent and a democratic nation, as we still apparently wish to think ourselves. This simply means that our highest principles and standards have no practical force or influence and are reduced merely to talk.

What is called the morality of a society is no more than a consequence of the morality of individuals. There is, by the same token, no such thing as a purely private morality, for the morals of private citizens are public in effect, and are increasingly so.

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly -an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a practical point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

But the earth speaks to us of Heaven, or why would we want to go there? If we knew nothing of Hell, how would we delight in Heaven should we get there?

They went to school, apparently, to learn to say over and over again, regardless of where they were, what had already been said too often. They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.

I don't want to deny myself the pleasure of bodily involvement in my work, for that pleasure seems to me to be the sign of an indispensable integrity.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

As a nation, then, we are not very religious and not very democratic, and that is why we have been destroying the family farm for the last forty years—along with other small local economic enterprises of all kinds. We have been willing for millions of people to be condemned to failure and dispossession by the workings of an economy utterly indifferent to any claims they may have had either as children of God or as citizens of a democracy.

It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it.

Though I knew that actually I had heard no voice, I could not dismiss the possibility that it had spoken and I had failed to hear it because of some deficiency in me or something wrong that I had done….I decided that I had better accept the call that had not come, just in case it had come and I had missed it.

I never shed a tear that day, but all day long I saw Margaret as her father and her grandfather saw her. I loved her that day with my love but also with theirs.

The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.

The university thought of itself as a place of freedom for thought and study and experimentation, and maybe it was, in a way. But it was an island too, a floating or a flying island. It was preparing people from the world of the past for the world of the future, and what was missing was the world of the present, where every body was living its small, short, surprising, miserable, wonderful, blessed, damaged, only life.

Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men, and that has bent my mind and made me think of darkness and wish for the dumb life of roots.

After you have said "thy will be done," what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray "thy will be done" after you see what it means?

the American Indian, who was ignorant by the same standards, nevertheless knew how to live in the country without making violence the invariable mode of his relation to it; in fact, from the ecologist's or the conservationist's point of view, he did it no violence. This is because he had, in place of what we would call education, a fully integrated culture, the content of which was a highly complex sense of his dependence on the earth.

You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time." "And how long is that going to take?" "I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps." "That could be a long time." "I will tell you a further mystery," he said "It may take longer.

I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember

For everything that comes is a gift, the meaning always carried out of sight to renew our whereabouts, always a starting place. And every gift is perfect in its beginning, for it is "from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.

I was changed by Nathan's death, because I had to be. Our life together here was over. It was my life alone that had to go on. The strand had slackened. I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember.

Ease of going was translated without pause into a principled unwillingness to stop.

Oh, it ain't mine. I don't own anything I can't carry or that won't follow me when I whistle.

our great modern error is the belief that we must invariably give up one thing in order to have another. But it is possible, for instance, to find comfort, pleasure, and beauty in food, clothing, and shelter. It is possible to find pleasure and beauty and even recreation in work. It is possible to have farms that do not waste and poison the natural world.