Quote

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

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
Live
Never
Life
Possible
Future
Past

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part the free world seems to be regarding it as merely normal.
Wendell Berry
Image
Physical health doesn't exist apart from the health of other things. Health ultimately involves the community, and the community ultimately involves the place and natural life of that place, so that real health is harmony with the world.
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 live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory.
Wendell Berry
Image
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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
To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.
Wendell Berry
Image
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
Wendell Berry
Image
Give your approval to all you cannot understand.
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
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 more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.
Wendell Berry
Image
There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.
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
Image
The name of our proper connection to the earth is 'good work,' for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials it honors the place where it is done it honors the art by which it is done it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing.
Wendell Berry
Image
A tree forms itself in answer to its place and the light. Explain it how you will, the only thing explainable will be your explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV
Wendell Berry
Image
I have always loved a window, especially an open one.
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
and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.
Wendell Berry
Image
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Wendell Berry