Quote

What can't be helped must be endured.

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
Helped
Must
Endured

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
It's mighty hard right now to think of anything that's precious that isn't endangered. 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.
Wendell Berry
Image
You're making the grant of affection, forbearance, mercy, out of your own experience and, of course, out of cultural tradition. You're saying, to use the well-worn analogy, if I love my children, that puts me under obligation to assume that other people love theirs.
Wendell Berry
Image
I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
Wendell Berry
Image
We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.
Wendell Berry
Image
To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.
Wendell Berry
Image
When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.
Wendell Berry
Image
Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Wendell Berry
Image
A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.
Wendell Berry
Image
No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.
Wendell Berry
Image
To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.
Wendell Berry
Image
Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
Wendell Berry
Image
An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
Wendell Berry
Image
A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. The realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has always conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done.
Wendell Berry
Image
There is much good work to be done by every one of us and we must begin to do it.
Wendell Berry
Image
Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'
Wendell Berry
Image
When you have large-scale legitimated violence in a place that is divided as profoundly and bitterly as Kentucky was, the legitimate violence can cause illegitimate violence, a terrible local heartlessness and cruelty that feeds on itself and goes on and on.
Wendell Berry
Image
Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
Wendell Berry
Image
Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
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
Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma.
Wendell Berry