Wendell Berry

For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.

A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.

The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.

The world is whole beyond human knowing.

Healing is impossible in loneliness it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.

We're trying to give the young people something that can help them, and we don't know exactly what it ought to be.

The old and honorable idea of 'vocation' is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who by principle have no local commitment.

Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world's beauty and abundance.

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

The road is a word conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it a word made concrete and thrust among us.

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

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.

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

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.

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.

The earth is what we all have in common.

We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.

The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.

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.

Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.

...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 fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air ground and water to alter and harm to whatever degree human life and wildlife As a conservative I do abhor it.

These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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.

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

Whether we or our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.

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.

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.

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.

One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.

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.

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

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

All right, every day ain't going to be the best day of your life, don't worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.

Love is what carries you for it is always there even in the dark or most in the dark but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

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.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.

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.

All right every day aint going to be the best day of your life dont worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.

But we didnt speak of what was bothering us the most. Maybe we didnt need to. It couldnt have been talked out. It had to be worn out.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

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.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality by living within our limits by being humans not by trying to be gods.

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.

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?