You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“It just seemed that, as we waited together for the coming of this life, it had become wrong to sit apart.” — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“...this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine;… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“Back there in the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“I could not have desired her enough. She was a living soul and could be loved forever. Like every living creature, she… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“Late in the night I pay the unrest I own to the life that has never lived and cannot live now. What… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can't… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The theme of his life’s work was his effort to bridge this gap. The way to do it was simply to refuse… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment" -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is.… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“To both the racist and the puritan, childhood is not a time of life that we grow out of, as the life… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“My social life changed. Before, I had yearned for company, especially the company of women, and had gone seeking it. Now I… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“I had changed, and the sign of it was only that my own death seemed to me by far the least important… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“The world has room for many people who are content to live as humans, but only for a relative few intent upon… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
During the last 17 years... I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
“The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in mariage. My grandfather made… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't.… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
“I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
“The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment" -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
“That we can prescribe the terms of our own success, that we can live outside or in ignorance of the Great Economy are the… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
“The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend.… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either. — Wendell Berry Copy Share
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all. — Wendell Berry Copy Share
I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean… — Wendell Berry Copy Share
