Wendell Berry
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.Collection: Law
New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.Collection: Hurt
When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.Collection: Make Sense
I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it's environment. The environment is in you. It's passing through you. You're breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.Collection: Breathing
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.Collection: People
If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?Collection: Smart
People are always talking about the first church. The real first church was that gaggle of people who followed Jesus around. We don't know anything about them. But he apparently didn't ask them what creed they subscribed to, or what their sexual preference was, or any of that. He fed them. He healed them. He forgave them. He is clear about sin, but he was also for forgiveness.Collection: Jesus
Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.Collection: Fire
The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.Collection: War
There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.Collection: Sacred
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.Collection: Inspirational
I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.Collection: Circles
The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. (pg. 326, The Pleasures of Eating)Collection: Morning
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.Collection: Numbers
History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.Collection: Regret
To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, and Community)Collection: Thinking
Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.Collection: Giving
You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.Collection: Example
In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.Collection: Work
It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil.Collection: Spiritual
Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.Collection: Practice
We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.Collection: Stupid
Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.Collection: Animal
If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.Collection: Journey
I dream of a quiet man / who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows / where the rarest wildflowers / are blooming, and who goes, / and finds that he is smiling / not by his own will.Collection: Dream
The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.Collection: Environment
However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always found to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.Collection: Powerful
A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.Collection: Faith
In losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.Collection: Environmental
Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable inquiries, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy-which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life.Collection: Christian
Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.Collection: World
We are living even now among punishments and ruins.Collection: Punishment
The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.Collection: Age
We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.Collection: Life
As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful. We have no choice then but to become its exploiters, and to lose, by consequence, our place in it. It is only when, by humility, openness, generosity, courage, we make ourselves able to relate to it on its terms that it ceases to be alien.Collection: Humility
The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.Collection: Technology
Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.Collection: Respect
There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.Collection: Novelty
Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.Collection: Answers
Eating is an agricultural act.Collection: Agriculture
You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the coughCollection: Rivers
The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest. In the cleared fields where he gardens and pastures his horses it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences.Collection: Country
How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry-between say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off." Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.Collection: War
If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared. (pg. 59, "Racism and the Economy")Collection: Real
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.Collection: Reading
Thinking is the most overrated human activity.Collection: Thinking
A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.Collection: Community
Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.Collection: Hands
If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its own love be swayed down to the world? ...how it might, because it could know its own creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death?Collection: Fate