Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 13

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• The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.

  Wendell Berry

  Jobs, People, Entrepreneur

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• The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.

  Wendell Berry

  Looks, Dare

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• Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
  vacation with pay. Want more
  of everything ready-made. Be afraid
  to know your neighbors and to die.
  And you will have a window in your head.
  Not even your future will be a mystery
  any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
  and shut away in a little drawer.
  When they want you to buy something
  they will call you. When they want you
  to die for profit they will let you know.

  Wendell Berry

  Vacation, Mind, Cards

  Wendell Berry (2013). “A Country of Marriage: Poems”, p.16, Counterpoint Press

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• A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

  Wendell Berry

  Education, Mean, Order

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

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• We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.

  Wendell Berry

  Miracle, Alive, Mystery

  Wendell Berry (2001). “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition”, Counterpoint Press

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• There are endless ways to amuse oneself and be idle, and most of them lie outside the woods. I assume that when a man goes to the woods he goes because he needs to. I think he is drawn to the wilderness much as he is drawn to a woman: it is, in its way, his opposite. It is as far as possible unlike his home or his work or anything he will ever manufacture. For that reason he can take from it a solace-an understanding of himself, of what he needs and what he can do without-such as he can find nowhere else.

  Wendell Berry

  Lying, Home, Men

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• Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

  Wendell Berry

  World, Eating, Used

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.149, Counterpoint Press

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• We are now, measurably, reducing the availability of these life-supporting goods which we can think of (though only on the conditions of good health and good care) as self-renewing or "sustainable." We are also destroying rapidly the supplies of the fossil fuels, which are limited and not renewable, and on which we have become totally dependent.

  Wendell Berry

  Thinking, Self, Availability

  Wendell Berry (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.146, Counterpoint Press

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• It is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever. I turn against you, I break from you, I turn to you. We hurt, and are hurt, and have each other for healing. It is healing. It is never whole.

  Wendell Berry

  Hurt, Healing, Broken

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.81, Counterpoint Press

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• Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

  Wendell Berry

  Plant, Millennium

  Wendell Berry (2009). “The Mad Farmer Poems”, p.12, Counterpoint Press

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• The sense of it may come with watching a flock of cedar waxwings eating wild grapes in the top of the woods on a November afternoon. Everything they do is leisurely. They pick the grapes with a curious deliberation, comb their feathers, converse in high windy whistles. Now and then one will fly out and back in a sort of dancing flight full of whimsical flutters and turns. They are like farmers loafing in their own fields on Sunday. Though they have no Sundays, their days are full of sabbaths.

  Wendell Berry

  Sunday, Dancing, Cedars

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• A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.

  Wendell Berry

  Past, Needs, Assumption

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.121, Counterpoint

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• After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.

  Wendell Berry

  Lying, Grief, Darkness

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• A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written.

  Wendell Berry

  Family, Farmers, Written

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• Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato

  Wendell Berry

  Baby, Age, Citizens

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.85, Counterpoint

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• When the mind's an empty room
  The clear days come.

  Wendell Berry

  Empty Rooms, Mind, Clear Day

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.193, Counterpoint Press

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• The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

  Wendell Berry

  Exactly Is, Speak, Ability

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Imagination in Place”, p.13, Counterpoint

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• Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma.

  Wendell Berry

  Depressing, People, Levels

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• But in fact as knowledge expands globally it is being lost locally. This is the paramount truth of the modern history of rural places everywhere in the world. And it is the gravest problem of land use: Modern humans typically are using places whose nature they have never known and whose history they have forgotten; thus ignorant, they almost necessarily abuse what they use.

  Wendell Berry

  Land, Abuse, Ignorant

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• To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.

  Wendell Berry

  Husband, Animal, Land

  Wendell Berry (2009). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food”, p.75, Counterpoint Press

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• And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present

  Wendell Berry

  Light, Being Thankful, Pulse

  Wendell Berry (2005). “Hannah Coulter: A Novel”, p.148, Counterpoint Press

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• In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.

  Wendell Berry

  Work, Intelligent, Skills

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.26, Counterpoint

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• History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.

  Wendell Berry

  Regret, Community, Forever

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• To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, and Community)

  Wendell Berry

  Thinking, Order, Land

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.192, Counterpoint

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• Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.

  Wendell Berry

  Giving, Reason

  Wendell Berry (2013). “This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems”, p.141, Counterpoint

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