Quote

What would be the point of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded and poisoned, or personally free in a world entirely controlled by the government or enlightened by television?

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
Society
Poisoned
Point
Enlightened
Free
Controlled
Government
Personally
Whole
Entirely
Would
Healthy
World
Television
Dismembered
Land
Eroded

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.
Wendell Berry
Image
Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.
Wendell Berry
Image
An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
Wendell Berry
Image
An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
Wendell Berry
Image
We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.
Wendell Berry
Image
There is a religious principle: Love thy neighbour as thyself. But it's also an economic asset. If you've got a neighbour, you've got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbours, you can't have a limitless growth economy. You have to prefer to have a neighbour rather than to own your neighbour farm.
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
Willing to die you give up your will keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.
Wendell Berry
Image
You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.
Wendell Berry
Image
Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.
Wendell Berry
Image
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
Wendell Berry
Image
Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.
Wendell Berry
Image
It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
Wendell Berry
Image
O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.
Wendell Berry
Image
But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.
Wendell Berry
Image
The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.
Wendell Berry
Image
THE WILD ROSE” – BY WENDELL BERRY Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart. Suddenly you flare again in my sight A wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was only shade And I am blessed and choose again, That which I chose before.
Wendell Berry
Image
If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
Wendell Berry
Image
The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflied that fly up in flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.
Wendell Berry
Image
Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.
Wendell Berry