Quote

If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.

Wendell Berry

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Wasting
Lives
Live
Work

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
Wendell Berry
Image
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
Wendell Berry
Image
The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
Wendell Berry
Image
How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves
Wendell Berry
Image
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.
Wendell Berry
Image
We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. (pg. 43, The Unsettling of America)
Wendell Berry
Image
The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.
Wendell Berry
Image
I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
Wendell Berry
Image
You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough
Wendell Berry
Image
To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Wendell Berry
Image
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
Wendell Berry
Image
A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.
Wendell Berry
Image
The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
Wendell Berry
Image
To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.
Wendell Berry
Image
It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.
Wendell Berry
Image
There are no unsacred places there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
Wendell Berry
Image
The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.
Wendell Berry
Image
Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.
Wendell Berry
Image
Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.
Wendell Berry
Image
There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.
Wendell Berry