Wendell Berry is an American writer and farmer known for his works on agriculture, rural life, and community. He is a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
If you don’t know where you’re from, you’ll have a hard time saying where you’re going.
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.
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. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.
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.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief… For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it.
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.
If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
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.
Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.
There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.
You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.
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.
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.
When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.
So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute… Give your approval to all you cannot understand… Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years… Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts… Practice resurrection.
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out – perhaps a little at a time.
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.
It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey.
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.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.