Wendell Berry Quotes

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

The earth is what we all have in common.

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.

In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else’s mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality of the goods we buy, or about the health of our own place and economy.

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.

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.

The good worker…works to preserve the integrity, the harmony, the beauty of his or her work. The good worker uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. The good worker never uses a tool without knowing the history or the meaning of that tool; never uses a thing without knowing its purpose and its source.

No settled family or community has ever called its home place an ‘environment.’ None has ever called its feeling for its home place ‘biocentric’ or ‘anthropocentric.’ None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as ‘ecological,’ deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of ‘ecology’ and ‘ecosystems.’ But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, separate, and displace the mind from the senses. What’s more important, I believe, is that they come from the murkiness of money, where everything is connected to everything else only by the links of buying and selling.

One of the spiritual risks of having wealth is that you don’t understand the concept of enough.

The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.

Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only hope of survival.

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.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.

The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs defenders.

It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.

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.

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.

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.

Healthy soil is covered with perennial plants, and unhealthy soil is not.

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.

My grandfather used to say that once in your life you need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, and a preacher. But every day, three times a day, you need a farmer.

It is not enough anymore for the farmer to know how to grow more to eat. He must now learn how to eat more to grow.

Eating is an agricultural act.

The world is not given to us on a lease or a conditional sales contract; we have it on a freehold, and our children have it for nothing.

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.

To know the world one must construct it.

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world – to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it.

The natural world may be invisible to the baby staring at the mobile above the crib, but it is not invisible to the gazelle, the pelican, the migratory fish, or the starling circling its roost on the roof of the Wal-Mart selling ‘silence’ machines, its pesticide-shriveled, oil-polluted feeder creek, and the two young hawks hunting a morning dove above its parking lot.

We can be ignorant of the past, ignorant of the future, and experience an imaginary sense of fulfillment in the present moment, but it is not knowledge because it is not fully connected.

Which one of us wants to live in a merely human world? Which one of us human beings could say without breaking his or her heart, ‘I’m not interested in the universe, only my own life?’

You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. You can kill a man, but not an idea.

Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.

The world that I belong to did not start in a stately municipal building in San Juan, or in the distant reaches of Wall Street or Philadelphia, it began on the penal plantation of Fontana, on the soil that generations of my people worked and loved.

Love is not a thing one person has for split seconds of a lifetime. It is cumulative.

Ideology cannot explain twenty million casualties. It suggests them.

To know the past, to know the land, to know the native people is… timeless. This will become urgent when there is no more to destroy that can be restored and a real danger of destroying even the possibility of restoration.

There are still signs that Americans can still do things at their own initiative and without a government mandate. But when it is done carefully, in a husbandry way, it is only a first step.

Walking every day, working, eating and sleeping in the Fieldstone Preserve, living out your life on this piece of ground, takes more vision, and more gall, in a world flushed down the drain by a careless, indulgent ignorance, than God in heaven can measure.

Only as we see, as we appreciate and dedicate, can we reinterpret in a poetic reflection, in a goal visionary, in some kind of an answer, in a re-understanding of where we are and what we are and who we are.

Before the extent of your land starts to get lost, define it. Diseased and aphid-infested trees and overgrown brush areas are an eyesore that should be removed before they start attracting vandals, drug dealers, and thieves. 45. Humanity wins the favor of heaven by exercising stewardship over the created world.