Quote

Returning from the wilderness a man becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forbears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.

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
Truth
Dying
Passings
Embodies
Human
Gives
Wilderness
Heir
Humans
Joy
Sees
Successors
Giving
Becomes
Passing
Honors
Men
Within
Grief
Heirs
Time
Living
Blessing
Recognizes
Forbears
True
Limits
Returning
Restorer
Order
Honor
Heritage
Preserver

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.
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
It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.
Wendell Berry
Image
Love changes, and in change is true.
Wendell Berry
Image
If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as a matter of course. I don't know what you'd call the result - probably not capitalism or socialism.
Wendell Berry
Image
No individual life is an end in itself. One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can live fully only by making ourselves answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time.
Wendell Berry
Image
You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.
Wendell Berry
Image
Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.
Wendell Berry
Image
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
Wendell Berry
Image
Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.
Wendell Berry
Image
We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.
Wendell Berry
Image
So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.
Wendell Berry
Image
In losing stewardship we lose fellowship we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.
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
Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
Wendell Berry
Image
The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.
Wendell Berry
Image
Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
Wendell Berry
Image
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
Wendell Berry
Image
But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life.
Wendell Berry
Image
When the mind's an empty room The clear days come.
Wendell Berry