Quote

The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.

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
City
Balance
Cities
Goal
Countryside
Sustainable
Indispensable
Ideal
Ideals

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
Geese appear high over us, / pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, / as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear / in the ancient faith: what we need / is here. And we pray, not / for new earth or heaven, but to be / quiet in heart, and in eye, / clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
Image
This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.
Wendell Berry
Image
We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground, and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife? As a conservative, I do abhor it.
Wendell Berry
Image
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
Wendell Berry
Image
The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.
Wendell Berry
Image
The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflied that fly up in flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.
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 have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.
Wendell Berry
Image
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
Wendell Berry
Image
In losing stewardship we lose fellowship we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.
Wendell Berry
Image
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
Wendell Berry
Image
When despair for the world grows in me... I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
Image
The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.
Wendell Berry
Image
I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.
Wendell Berry
Image
The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.
Wendell Berry
Image
I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.
Wendell Berry
Image
We need to confront honestly the issue of scale... You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.
Wendell Berry
Image
It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.
Wendell Berry
Image
Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact it is not a quantity.
Wendell Berry
Image
Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.
Wendell Berry