Quote

Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.

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
Killjoy
Communal
Restraint
Self

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.
Wendell Berry
Image
The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.
Wendell Berry
Image
I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.
Wendell Berry
Image
I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)
Wendell Berry
Image
It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.
Wendell Berry
Image
Action can only be understood in relation to place only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.
Wendell Berry
Image
To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
Image
We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.
Wendell Berry
Image
Analogies have tied things together for me, personally. The fundamental one for me is the analogy between your relationship to your spouse and your relationship to your place. Both need to be a settled commitment and both involve continuous learning and adjusting.
Wendell Berry
Image
The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.
Wendell Berry
Image
Healing is impossible in loneliness it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation. (pg.99, The Body and the Earth)
Wendell Berry
Image
Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!
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
One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.
Wendell Berry
Image
For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
Wendell Berry
Image
We are living even now among punishments and ruins.
Wendell Berry
Image
I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men.
Wendell Berry
Image
You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.
Wendell Berry
Image
The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
Wendell Berry
Image
Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Wendell Berry