Quote

That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.

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
Land
Agriculture
True
Nevertheless
Seems
Soil
May
Absurd
Need
Exactly
Must
Based
Needs
Seem
Much
Food
Petroleum

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.
Wendell Berry
Image
To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.
Wendell Berry
Image
It's mighty hard right now to think of anything that's precious that isn't endangered. There are no sacred and unsacred places there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
Wendell Berry
Image
We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
Wendell Berry
Image
In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.
Wendell Berry
Image
A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.
Wendell Berry
Image
If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
Wendell Berry
Image
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.
Wendell Berry
Image
What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
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
Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact it is not a quantity.
Wendell Berry
Image
Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
Wendell Berry
Image
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
Wendell Berry
Image
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
Wendell Berry
Image
Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.
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
To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
Image
The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.
Wendell Berry
Image
An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
Wendell Berry
Image
Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
Wendell Berry