Quotes from Wendell Berry

The English philosopher and geometer, Keith Critchlow, brings his own light to the same point: "The human mind takes apart with its analytic habits of reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves them . . ."18

Cecelia, as with every look and gesture she let us know, was entirely at ease only in the company of her equals—a company that included, besides herself, only her sister. And of course Cecelia held some secret doubts about herself; you can't dislike nearly everybody and be quite certain that you have exempted yourself.

We live by the assumption that what's good for us is good for the world. And this is based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what's good for us.

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.

If a soft answer turneth away wrath, maybe no answer stirreth wrath up.

But the safe competence of human work extends no further, ever, than our ability to think and love at the same time.

For a long time then I seemed to live by the slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life.

A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. Right is difficult and long. In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

Another place! it's enough to grieve me — that old dream of going, of becoming a better man just by getting up and going to a better place.