Quotes from Wendell Berry

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.

It's the impeded stream that sings

A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.

Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Especially among Christians in positions of wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus' commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective Christian.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

What I stand for is what I stand on.

And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.

I have always loved a window, especially an open one.

How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves

There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.

The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.

Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call the economy or the free market is less and less distinguishable from warfare.

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 legitimate hope.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.

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

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.

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.

If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going.