Quote

The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

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
Thought
Way
Constructions
Formed
Construction
Within
Language
Experience
Around

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.
Wendell Berry
Image
A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.
Wendell Berry
Image
Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
Wendell Berry
Image
But we can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present. For the amelioration of the future condition of our kind we must look, not to the wealth or the genius of the coming generations, but to the quality of the disciplines and attitudes that we are preparing now for their use.
Wendell Berry
Image
To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.
Wendell Berry
Image
It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.
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
The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.
Wendell Berry
Image
It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.
Wendell Berry
Image
Eating is an agricultural act.
Wendell Berry
Image
To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.
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
Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don’t buy anything new.
Wendell Berry
Image
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
Wendell Berry
Image
It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'
Wendell Berry
Image
The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.
Wendell Berry
Image
The old and honorable idea of 'vocation' is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.
Wendell Berry
Image
A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written.
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
Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'
Wendell Berry