I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.
WENDELL BERRYIf 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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And 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.
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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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An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
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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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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
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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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We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.
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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 atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
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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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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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I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
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Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
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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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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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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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Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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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.
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
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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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A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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