Quotes from Wendell Berry

If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.

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.

It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.

The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.

An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.

The old and honorable idea of 'vocation' is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.

We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.

Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.

There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.

Why I am NOT going to buy a computer

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.

Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.

To mind being disliked by a woman you don't desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.

A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.

A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.

In losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.

A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.

It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.

Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.

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.