Wendell Berry Quotes

397 quotes in 4720 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
• Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
• We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
• To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
• 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…
• Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
• 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…
• 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…
• For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
• Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
• The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
• The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
• If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.

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