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 BERRYAnd if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn’t make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn’t live without them.
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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.
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It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
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The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
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I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
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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.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
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Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.
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The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.
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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.
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
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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.
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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…
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Whether we or 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.
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This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.
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I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
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These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
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All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.
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The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
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Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
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