History leaves no doubt that among of the most regrettable crimes committed by human beings have been committed by those human beings who thought of themselves as civilized. What, we must ask, does our civilization possess that is worth defending?… — 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 still visible, and this year it has provided abundant pasture, more than in any year since we have owned it. But to make it as good as it is now has taken 17 years. If I… — 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 cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions… — 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 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. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever… — 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 Image
“The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment" -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound division between it an ourselves. We have given up the understanding -- dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought -- that we and our country create one another, depend on one… — 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 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 greatest errors. They condemn us to a life without a standard, wavering in inescapable bewilderment from paltry self-satisfaction to paltry self-dissatisfaction. But since we have no place to live but in the Great Economy, whether or… — 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 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
