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We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Time
Abuse
Waste
Use
Energy
Restrain
Cannot
Characterized
Human
Fossil
Humans
Fossils
Much
Fuel

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
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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
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It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.
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You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction
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I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it's environment. The environment is in you. It's passing through you. You're breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.
Wendell Berry
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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
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Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
Wendell Berry
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Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
Wendell Berry
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To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.
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Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.
Wendell Berry
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Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
Wendell Berry
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The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that to work is to pray. (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)
Wendell Berry
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Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.
Wendell Berry
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Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world's beauty and abundance.
Wendell Berry
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It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.
Wendell Berry
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It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.
Wendell Berry
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Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
Wendell Berry
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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
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I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children...
Wendell Berry
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There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.
Wendell Berry