Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 17

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• I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.

  Wendell Berry

  Beautiful, Hurt, Miracle

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

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• The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.

  Wendell Berry

  Rain, Garden, Two

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• This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.

  Wendell Berry

  Lying, Book, Reflection

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

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• The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.

  Wendell Berry

  World, New World

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

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• The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.

  Wendell Berry

  Rap, Tomorrow May Never Come, World

  Wendell Berry (2001). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, p.171, Counterpoint Press

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• To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.

  Wendell Berry

  Common Sense, Mind, Desire

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

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• At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.

  Wendell Berry

  Lying, Rivers, Ducks

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.87, Counterpoint Press

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• I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.

  Wendell Berry

  Beautiful, Thinking, World

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

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• The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

  Wendell Berry

  Differences, Perfect, Movement

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.12, Counterpoint

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• It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.

  Wendell Berry

  Christian, Humility, Unique

  Wendell Berry (1996). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, Counterpoint LLC

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• A tree forms itself in answer to its place and the light. Explain it how you will, the only thing explainable will be your explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV

  Wendell Berry

  Light, Tree, Answers

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• Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

  Wendell Berry

  Fear, Loneliness, Novelty

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.9, Counterpoint Press

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• So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.

  Wendell Berry

  Men, May, Ends

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• 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

  Grief, Doe, World

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• From a human point of view, the difference between the mind of a human and that of a mountain goat is wonderful; from the point of view of the infinite ignorance that surrounds us, the difference is not impressive. Indeed, from that point of view, the goat may have the better mind, for he is more congenially adapted to his place, and he would not endanger his species or his planet for the sake of an idea.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Ignorance, Animal

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• Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Believe, Animal

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.202, Counterpoint Press

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• Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

  Wendell Berry

  Addiction, Gadgets, Waste

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.158, Counterpoint Press

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• Under the rule of the "free market" ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation.

  Wendell Berry

  Two, Oil, Energy

  Wendell Berry (1993). “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays”, Pantheon

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• This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

  Wendell Berry

  Ignorance, Character, Oil

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.20, Counterpoint

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• To be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be well known...The "animal scientist" to whom it is of no concern whether or not animals suffer will almost inevitably aid and abet the destruction of the decent old ideal of animal husbandry and, as a consequence, increase the suffering of animals. I hope that my country may be delivered from the remote, cold abstractions of university science.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Animal, Pet

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• As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.

  Wendell Berry

  Long, Strange, Aliens

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• For complex reasons, our culture allows "economy" to mean only "money economy." It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement. I am no economist, but I venture to suggest that one of the laws of such an economy is that a farmer is worth more dead than alive. A second law is that anything diseased is more profitable than anything that is healthy. What is wrong with us contributes more to the "gross national product" than what is right with us.

  Wendell Berry

  Success, Mean, Law

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• The 'environmental crisis' has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of 'raw materials,' and that we may safely possess those materials by taking them.... And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as 'environmental' problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspiring, Simple, Years

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.178, Counterpoint Press

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• There are two laws that we had better take to be absolute. The first is that as we cannot exempt ourselves from living in this world, then if we wish to live, we cannot exempt ourselves from using the world. If we cannot exempt ourselves from use, then we must deal with the issues raised by use. And so the second law is that if we want to continue living, we cannot exempt use from care.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspiring, Law, Two

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• Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.

  Wendell Berry

  Self, Restraint, Killjoy

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