Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry

"...make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came." Wendell Berry"
68 Quotes
"...make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came." Wendell Berry"
Wendell Berry
"...a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life."
Wendell Berry
"And his words fell upon the table like a blessing."
Wendell Berry
"Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend."
Wendell Berry
"Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)"
Wendell Berry
"When I rise uplet me rise up joyfullike a bird. When I falllet me fall without regretlike a leaf."
Wendell Berry
"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."
Wendell Berry
"The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten."
Wendell Berry
"Novelty is a new kind of loneliness."
Wendell Berry
"She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry."
Wendell Berry
"He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat."
Wendell Berry
"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. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality."
Wendell Berry
"People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us."
Wendell Berry
"There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love."
Wendell Berry
"Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time."
Wendell Berry
"The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all."
Wendell Berry
"I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun."
Wendell Berry
"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."
Wendell Berry
"Thinking is the most overrated human activity."
Wendell Berry
"No one has madethe art by which one makes the worksof art. Each one who speaks speaksas a convocation. We live as councilsof ghosts. It is not "human genius"that makes us human, but an old love,an old intelligence of the heartwe gather to us from the world,from the creatures, from the angelsof inspiration, from the dead--an intelligence merely nonexistentto those who do not have it, but --to those who have it more dear than life."
Wendell Berry
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