100+ 'Wendell Berry' Quotes On Love, Life And Planet Earth

Wendell Berry is a well-known poet, author, and environmentalist, whose quotes inspire everyone.

He has written over 40 books in his lifetime. A farmer by profession, Wendell Berry quotes are well known across the world.

Wendell Berry quotes have touched the lives of many people. He has compiled his words on life, peace, nature, earth, ground, and so on into more than 40 books.

If you love these Wendell Berry quotes, check out these Tom Robbins quotes and Washington Irving quotes too!

‍

The Best Wendell Berry Quotes

Wendell Berry conveyed deep meanings via his wise sayings.

1. “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 memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

― Wendell Berry.

2. “So, friends, every day do something that won't compute... Give your approval to all you cannot understand.”

― Wendell Berry, 'The Country Of Marriage'.

3. “It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

― Wendell Berry.

4.  "I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

― Wendell Berry, 'The Selected Poems Of Wendell Berry'.

5. “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

― Wendell Berry, Given.

6. “You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”

― Wendell Berry.

7. “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives."

― Wendell Berry.

8. "You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers."

― Wendell Berry, 'Jayber Crow'.

9. “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”

― Wendell Berry.

10. “A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”

― Wendell Berry.

11. "To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival."

― Wendell Berry.

12. "The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility."

Wendell Berry

13. "It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are. "

-Wendell Berry.

14. "Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup."

- Wendell Berry.

15. "To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd."

- Wendell Berry.

16. "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 a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted."

- Wendell Berry

17. "The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology."

-Wendell Berry.

18. "If we can't afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we're in an insurmountable mess."

-Wendell Berry.

19. "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 heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods."

- Wendell Berry.

20."The two great aims of industrialism - replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy - seem close to fulfillment."

- Wendell Berry.

21. "Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire."

- Wendell Berry.

22. "It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."

- Wendell Berry.

23. "Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone."

- Wendell Berry.

24. "Be joyful because it is humanly possible."

- Wendell Berry.

25. "Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery."

- Wendell Berry.

26. "I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever."

- Wendell Berry.

27. "What I stand for is what I stand on."

- Wendell Berry.

28. "Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call 'the economy' or 'the free market' is less and less distinguishable from warfare."

- Wendell Berry.

29. "Eating is an agricultural act."

- Wendell Berry.

30. "If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going."

- Wendell Berry.

31. "The environment is in you... You and every other creature."

- Wendell Berry.

32. "People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food"

- Wendell Berry.

33. "They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest."

-Wendell Berry

34. "We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not."

-Wendell Berry.

35. "It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'"

-Wendell Berry.

36. "There is much good work to be done by every one of us and we must begin to do it".

-Wendell Berry.

37. "When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird."

-Wendell Berry.

38. "Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen."

-Wendell Berry.

39. "We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist."

-Wendell Berry.

40. "Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass"

-Wendell Berry.

41. "Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice."

-Wendell Berry.

42. "All right, every day ain't going to be the best day of your life, don't worry about that."

-Wendell Berry.

43. "The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay."

-Wendell Berry.

44. "When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn."

-Wendell Berry.

45. "We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it."

-Wendell Berry

Famous Wendell Berry Quotes

Glance through some famous Wendell Berry quotes given below.

46. "We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?"

-Wendell Berry.

47. "For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless."

-Wendell Berry.

48. "We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose."

-Wendell Berry.

49. "I'm a writer more than I am a talker."

-Wendell Berry.

50. "I've had a good life, and was born to and among people I've admired and loved."

-Wendell Berry.

51. "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 escape it only by adding something better to it. "

-Wendell Berry.

52. "The earth is what we all have in common"

-Wendell Berry.

53. "Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts"

-Wendell Berry.

54. "We're trying to give the young people something that can help them, and we don't know exactly what it ought to be."

-Wendell Berry.

55. "If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk."

-Wendell Berry.

56. "A sustainable agriculture does not deplete soils or people."

-Wendell Berry.

57. "Individualism is going around these days in uniform."

-Wendell Berry.

58. "All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today."

-Wendell Berry.

59. "What can't be helped must be endured."

-Wendell Berry.

60. "Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant."

-Wendell Berry.

61. "Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war."

Wendell Berry.

62. "We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities."

-Wendell Berry.

63. "We are living even now among punishments and ruins."

-Wendell Berry.

64. "We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species."

-Wendell Berry.

65. "Thinking is the most overrated human activity."

-Wendell Berry.

66. "Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed"

-Wendell Berry.

67. "In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known."

-Wendell Berry.

68. "To farm is to be placed absolutely."

-Wendell Berry.

69. "Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there."

-Wendell Berry.

70. "The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all."

-Wendell Berry.

71. “When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.”

-Wendell Berry.

72. “Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.”

- Wendell Berry.

73. “The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.”

- Wendell Berry.

74. “Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.”

- Wendell Berry.

75. “ There's no substitute for petroleum.”

- Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry Quotes On Farming

Among all Wendell Berry quotes, farming and agriculture is an important theme. Go through the Wendell Berry quotes given below to know what he has to say.

76. “American agriculture is badly in need of diversity.”

- Wendell Berry.

77. “I dream of a quiet man

who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows

where the rarest wildflowers

are blooming, and who goes,

and finds that he is smiling

not by his own will.”

- Wendell Berry.

78. “People talk about 'job creation,' as if that had ever been the aim of the industrial economy.”

-Wendell Berry.

79. “The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.”

- Wendell Berry.

80. “Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen.”

- Wendell Berry.

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

Wendell Berry.

82.  "Grief gives the full measure of love, and it is somehow reassuring to learn, even by suffering, how large and powerful love is."

~ Wendell Berry

83. "Practice resurrection."

~ Wendell Berry.

84. “Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.”

— Wendell Berry, 'Jayber Crow'.

85. "We cannot comprehend what comprehends us."

— Wendell Berry.

86. “If you eat, you are involved in agriculture.”

— Wendell Berry.

87.“In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.”

— Wendell Berry.

88. “It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past."

— Wendell Berry.

89. "The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed."

— Wendell Berry.

90: “A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help."

— Wendell Berry.

91. “But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present."

— Wendell Berry.

92. “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are."

— Wendell Berry.

93. “I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water."

— Wendell Berry.

94. “The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm."

— Wendell Berry.

95. "... make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came."

-Wendell Berry.

96. "To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we know that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined."

-Wendell Berry.

97. "There comes... a longing never to travel again except on foot."

-Wendell Berry.

98. "The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part."

-Wendell Berry.

99. "Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established."

-Wendell Berry.

100. "Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me."

-Wendell Berry.

101. "Books were a dependable pleasure."

-Wendell Berry.

At Kidadl, we have created lots of family-friendly quotes for everyone! If you liked these Wendell Berry quotes, why not check out these Warsan Shire quotes, or [Thomas Wolfe quotes] too?

‍