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
Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“But this is not the story of a life. It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again… — 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
So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed… — 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
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
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“What happens under the rule of specialization is that, though society becomes more and more intricate, it has less and less structure.… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
There's a world of difference . . . between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers,… — 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
“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
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'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's sad that we live in a society that has the refrain 'thank God it's Friday, that means you despise 5/7ths of… — 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
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 enjoyed coming and going without telling or explaining, being free. I enjoyed listening without talking. I enjoyed being wherever I was… — 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
“For a long time then I seemed to live by the slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this… — Wendell Berry Copy Share Image
“If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line -… — 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
