Wendell Berry
If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.Collection: Life
Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.Collection: Warfare
A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.Collection: Home
It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.Collection: Jesus
I'd rather rely on mother nature's wisdom than man's clevernessCollection: Mother
In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.Collection: World
Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world.Collection: Taken
Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.Collection: People
There's a world of difference . . . between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.Collection: Life
You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.Collection: Support Systems
We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.Collection: Bread
The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.Collection: Book
Our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our landCollection: Land
Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.Collection: Laughter
...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.Collection: Heart
Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.Collection: Ignorance
What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?Collection: Ideas
It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.Collection: World
Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.Collection: Best Things
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.Collection: Civilization
So friends, every day do something that won't compute.Collection: Simplicity
There is a religious principle: Love thy neighbour as thyself. But it's also an economic asset. If you've got a neighbour, you've got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbours, you can't have a limitless growth economy. You have to prefer to have a neighbour rather than to own your neighbour farm.Collection: Religious
If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.Collection: Our Lives
A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us... What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth's ability to produce.Collection: Home
Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.Collection: Dream
To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.Collection: Cost
The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing and makingCollection: Want
We live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory.Collection: Theory
I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.Collection: Thinking
No individual life is an end in itself. One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can live fully only by making ourselves answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time.Collection: Environmental
To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.Collection: Thinking
No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to "spiritual" subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.Collection: Spiritual
Why I am NOT going to buy a computerCollection: Computer
A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.Collection: Teacher
Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.Collection: Challenges
If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.Collection: Educational
As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.Collection: Book
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 themselvesCollection: Soulmate
To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.Collection: Needs
I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.Collection: Unique
Be joyful because it is humanly possible.Collection: Joyful
Our Children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience, or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water come from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.Collection: Nature
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.Collection: Journey
It's the impeded stream that singsCollection: Wisdom
Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.Collection: Land
A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.Collection: Mutual Help
The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.Collection: Christian
We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.Collection: Nature