Quotes from Wendell Berry

...make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came." Wendell Berry

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.

We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody's enemy.

For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.

In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.

Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.

What I stand for is what I stand on.

The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle - those things are good gifts. The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts. We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn't make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn't live without them.

Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.