Quotes from Wendell Berry

The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend. Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by Your will, not ours. And it is fit Our only choice should be to die Into that rest, or out of it.

A man ought to study the wilderness of a place before applying to it the ways he learned in another place.

A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came.

When you have gone too far, as I think he did, the only mending is to come home.

Dance,' they told me, and I stood still, and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced. 'Pray,' they said, and I laughed, covering myself in the earth's brightnesses, and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.

For agrarians, the correct response is to stand confidently on our fundamental premise, which is both democratic and ecological: the land is a gift of immeasurable value. If it is a gift, then it is a gift to all the living in all time. To withhold it from some is finally to destroy it for all. For a few powerful people to own or control it all, or decide its fate, is wrong.

He wasn't much of a listener, not a great payer of attention to things outside his head.

All good human work remembers its history.

I finally knew, I told him, why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed that prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed His divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal.

There is much good work to be done by every one of us and we must begin to do it.

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.