Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Wendell Berry (American Author, Environmentalist)

Wendell Berry (b.1934,) fully Wendell Erdman Berry, is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A versatile author, he is celebrated for his nature poetry, his novels of America’s rural past, and his essays on ecological responsibility.

Born on a farm in Henry County, Kentucky Berry received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Kentucky, Lexington. After teaching at Stanford and New York universities and the University of Kentucky, quit academics in 1977 to focus on farming and writing.

Berry is the author of over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His works feature themes such as farming community and ecological responsibility, reverence for the land, and traditional, agrarian values. Berry’s poems are collected in The Broken Ground (1964,) Openings (1968,) Findings (1969,) and The Wheel (1983.)

Berry’s works stress the need for humans to live in harmony with the natural rhythms of the earth. His novels include The Memory of Old Jack (1974.) His books of essays include The Unsettling of America (1977,) The Gift of Good Land (1981,) Standing by Words (1983,) What Are People For? (1990,) Another Turn of the Crank (1995,) and Citizenship Papers (2003.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Wendell Berry

It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Excellence

And find that dark, too blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet, and dark wings.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Wildlife

I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Identity

Peaceableness toward enemies is an idea that will, of course, continue to be denounced as impractical. It has been too little tried by individuals, much less by nations. It will not readily or easily serve those who are greedy for power. It cannot be effectively used for bad ends. It could not be used as the basis of an empire. It does not afford opportunities for profit. It involves danger to practitioners. It requires sacrifice. And yet it seems to me that it is practical, for it offers the only escape from the logic of retribution. It is the only way by which we can cease to look to war for peace. … Peaceableness is not passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. If it is not a practical and practicable method, it is nothing. As a practicable method, it reduces helplessness in the face of conflict. In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one.
Wendell Berry

The change of mind I am talking about involves not just a change of knowledge, but also a change of attitude toward our essential ignorance, a change in our bearing in the face of mystery. The principle of ecology, if we will take it to heart, should keep us aware that our lives depend on other lives and upon processes and energies in an interlocking system that, though we can destroy it, we can neither fully understand nor fully control. And our great dangerousness is that, locked in our selfish and myopic economies, we have been willing to change or destroy far beyond our power to understand.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Earth

O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.
Wendell Berry

We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.
Wendell Berry

We recognize defeated landscapes by the absence of pleasure from them.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Wilderness

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup
Wendell Berry
Topics: Arguments

As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association and affection.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Technology

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
Topics: Competition, Mercy

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
Topics: Energy

History leaves no doubt that among of the most regrettable crimes committed by human beings have been committed by those human beings who thought of themselves as civilized. What, we must ask, does our civilization possess that is worth defending? One thing worth defending, I suggest, is the imperative to imagine the lives of beings who are not ourselves and are not like ourselves: animals, plants, gods, spirits, people of other countries, other races, people of the other sex, places and enemies.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Tolerance

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.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Worry, Grief

The earth is what we all have in common.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Earth

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
Topics: Past, Past and Present

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Earth

The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.
Wendell Berry

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.
Wendell Berry
Topics: Gardening

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

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
Topics: Money

What I know of spirit is astir in the world. The god I have always expected to appear at the woods’ edge, beckoning, I have always expected to be a great relisher of this world, its good grown immortal in his mind.
Wendell Berry

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