To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival. - Wendell Berry
In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world. - Wendell Berry
The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten. - Wendell Berry
The Earth is what we all have in common. - Wendell Berry
He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat. - Wendell Berry
Novelty is a new kind of loneliness. - Wendell Berry
Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time. - Wendell Berry
The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling. - Wendell Berry
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. - Wendell Berry
And his words fell upon the table like a blessing. - Wendell Berry
I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun. - Wendell Berry
Thinking is the most overrated human activity. - Wendell Berry
What I stand for is what I stand on. - Wendell Berry
One thing work givesis the joy of not working,a minute here or therewhen I stand and only breathe,receiving the good of the air.It comes back. Good work donecomes back into the mind,a free breath drawn. - Wendell Berry
The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986) - Wendell Berry
...make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came." - Wendell Berry
When I rise uplet me rise up joyfullike a bird.When I falllet me fall without regretlike a leaf. - Wendell Berry
His work has been his necessity and his desire. - Wendell Berry
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
...a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life. - Wendell Berry
She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry. - Wendell Berry