To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
It is a fact that the entire Kentucky River system, which the central part of the state complacently depends upon for its… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
If in the human economy, a squash in the field is worth more than a bushel of soil, that does not mean… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and for each other. It is either that or continue merely to… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
There are, it seems, two muses: The Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
People are always talking about the first church. The real first church was that gaggle of people who followed Jesus around. We… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
I dream of a quiet man / who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows / where the rarest wildflowers /… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
We seem to know that international wars tend not to stop with their formal "peace treaties." We seem not to have thought… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 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 they don't.… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all. — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
