Wendell Berry Quotes.
If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.
If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
It may be that when we no longer know… which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
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 no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.
The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts. The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts. We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn’t make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn’t live without them.
It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
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 hope.
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
