Quote

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.

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
Rather
Precisely
Home
Soil
Persons
Garden
Undertakes
Person
Grow
Exploit
Mind
Economy
Exploits
Grows
Practices
Practice
Preserve
Wrong
Preserves

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
Eating is an agricultural act.
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
Give your approval to all you cannot understand.
Wendell Berry
Image
Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
Wendell Berry
Image
If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?
Wendell Berry
Image
Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following, there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water. There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make they are going down as fast as they can, but their sound seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.
Wendell Berry
Image
It's the impeded stream that sings
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
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 mind that is not baffled, is unemployed
Wendell Berry
Image
To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.
Wendell Berry
Image
I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
Wendell Berry
Image
When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.
Wendell Berry
Image
I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.
Wendell Berry
Image
Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
Wendell Berry
Image
At night make me one with the darkness In the morning make me one with the light.
Wendell Berry
Image
The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
Wendell Berry
Image
A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
Wendell Berry
Image
It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.
Wendell Berry
Image
The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts.
Wendell Berry