Wendell Quotes

Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another "until death," are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, "die" into their union with one another as a soul "dies" into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing ... ~ Wendell Berry

It's called a repository spell. Makes something bigger on the inside than on the outside. Works great for bags, barrels, hats, just about anything really, even a 1963 police box. ~ Chuck

Except to the insane narrow-mindedness of industrial economics, selfishness does not pay. ~ Wendell Berry

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

But the doctors in the past, as the review of the evidence showed, branded Jenner, Semmelweis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Pasteur, Lister, Koch and Keen as charlatans ... Napoleon said that war is too important to be left to the generals. We go on the assumption in the Senate that foreign relations are too important to be left to the diplomats ... this question (on a novel cancer cure) is too important to leave purely to doctors ... ~ Paul Douglas

Be honorable yourself if you wish to associate with honorable people. ~ Wendell Willkie

The difference between me and Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, as I had to see and feel even in my own grief, was that they were old and I was young. I was filled with life, with my life and Virgil's life, with the life of our baby, and with other lives that might, in time, come to me. But the Feltners had begun to be old. Life had quit coming to them, and was going away. ~ Wendell Berry

To think of food as a weapon, or of a weapon as food, may give an illusory security and wealth to a few, but it strikes directly at the life of all.

The concept of food-as-weapon is not surprisingly the doctrine of a Department of Agriculture that is being used as an instrument of foreign political and economic speculation. This militarizing of food is the greatest threat so far raised against the farmland and the farm communities of this country. If present attitudes continue, we may expect government policies that will encourage the destruction, by overuse, of farmland. This, of course, has already begun. To answer the official call for more production -- evidently to be used to bait or bribe foreign countries -- farmers are plowing their waterways and permanent pastures; lands that ought to remain in grass are being planted in row crops. Contour plowing, crop rotation, and other conservation measures seem to have gone out of favor or fashion in official circles and are practices less and less on the farm. This exclusive emphasis on production will accelerate the mechanization and chemicalization of farming, increase the price of land, increase overhead and operating costs, and thereby further diminish the farm population. Thus the tendency, if not the intention, of Mr. Butz confusion of farming and war, is to complete the deliverance of American agriculture into the hands of corporations. ~ Wendell Berry

But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time ... of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here ... It is in the world, but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here. ~ Wendell Berry

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future. ~ Wendell Berry

Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

As I went about my work then as a young woman, and still now when I am old, Grandmam has been often close to me in my thoughts. And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song. ~ Wendell Berry

If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer. If ~ Wendell Berry

But this is not the story of a life. It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave. ~ Wendell Berry

The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

XIII O my own small country, battered wife of my kind, made in time by life and its multiple ends, dying and rising again, you come to mere use, which is misuse by life self-estranged. Life is not of the body, For death disembodies it, and yet it suffers. Only life suffers, as you suffer use without care or thanks. They who abuse you live by your life, they thrive a while by your ruin. But now let us think instead of a husband and a wife, one flesh, whose flesh is one with their place, grace unearned, your gift, by which they are made your own. ~ Wendell Berry

Any abundance, in any amount, is illusory if it does not safeguard its producers. ~ Wendell Berry

Knowledge-it excites prejudices to call it science-is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree. ~ Wendell Berry

The corporate approach to agriculture or manufacturing or medicine or war increasingly undertakes to help at the risk of harm, sometimes of great harm. And once the risk of harm is appraised as "acceptable," the result often is absurdity: We destroy a village in order to save it; we destroy freedom in order to save it; we destroy the world in order to live in it. ~ Wendell Berry

Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

To save myself, I would try to summon up a vision of Mattie, but I could not see her. I could not imagine her. Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.
And then I would wake up and be in awe to see the daylight coming and my old familiar workaday life taking shape again in the dear world. Coherence and clarity returned. I could imagine myself again. I could imagine Mattie Chatham. I could imagine Port William. ~ Wendell Berry

I knew he that he didn't have the strength to get free. His life was being driven by a kind of flywheel. He had submitted to it and accepted it. It was turning fast. To slow it down or stop it and come to a place that was moving with the motion only of time and loss and slow grief was more, that day, than he could imagine.

I knew too that it was more than he could bear. ~ Wendell Berry

But grief and griever alike endure. ~ Wendell Berry

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality. ~ Wendell Phillips

This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water. ~ Wendell Berry

Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss. ~ Wendell Berry

After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down. ~ Wendell Berry

We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist. ~ Wendell Berry

What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action. ~ Wendell Phillips

Accept the life that comes. Work and strive, but accept. Don't force the world to be the one you dream. ~ Susan Spencer Wendell

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit. ~ Wendell Berry

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the "gentleman and soldier."
However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism - an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves. ~ Wendell Berry

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity. ~ Wendell Berry

If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its own love be swayed down to the world? ... how it might, because it could know its own creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death? ~ Wendell Berry

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry - as in any other industry - the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (presumably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. ~ Wendell Berry

Brains and character rule the world. The most distinguished Frenchman of the last century said: Men succeed less by their talents than their character. There were scores of men a hundred years ago who had more intellect than Washington. He outlives and overrides them all by the influence of his character. ~ Wendell Phillips

Learn the sweet magic of a cheerful face. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I know for a while again the health of self-forgetfulness.

Sabbaths 2000 V ~ Wendell Berry

I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure. ~ Wendell Berry

Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

We live under a government of men and morning newspapers. ~ Wendell Phillips

The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people ~ Wendell Phillips

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us. ~ Wendell Berry

Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

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 ~ Wendell Berry

Immoral laws are doubtless void, and should not be obeyed. ~ Wendell Phillips

But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it. ~ Wendell Berry

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. ~ Wendell Berry

This fearful grief has grown familiar to me since I first felt it at the start of World War II, but at each of its returns it is worse. Each new resort to violence enlarges the argument against our species, and the task of hope becomes harder. I ~ Wendell Berry

Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources. ~ Wendell Berry

However interesting and lovely my days were, I could get from one day to the next only by passing through a night. I have, it is true, known lovely nights here; nights of sound sleep and good dreams and nights made wakeful by happy thoughts. but I have not always been a good sleeper, and my thoughts at night have sometimes been far from happy. ~ Wendell Berry

If the devil doesn't exist ... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be? ~ Wendell Berry

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate 'relationship' involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the 'married' couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.

There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, 'mine' is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as 'ours.'

This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a house ~ Wendell Berry

War? War is an organized bore. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. ~ Wendell Berry

Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there. ~ Wendell Berry

And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are.

And so I have to say that another of the golden threads is gratitude.

I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts. ~ Wendell Berry

To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know. ~ Wendell Berry

No man has the right to use the great powers of the Presidency to lead the people, indirectly, into war. ~ Wendell Willkie

To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, and Community) ~ Wendell Berry

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass. ~ Wendell Berry

If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause. ~ Wendell Phillips

The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future. ~ Wendell Phillips

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

[The Constitution] is an experiment as all life is an experiment. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another "until death," are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. ~ Wendell Berry

We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw. ~ Wendell Berry

Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessing, enduring what could not be helped. And there was no use in thinking of that fluid, glistening instant that always seems, in looking back, to have come between what might have happened and what happened, when one might have made some little choice that would have changed forever the course of things. ~ Wendell Berry

The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing and making ~ Wendell Berry

We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.
(pg. 73, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine") ~ Wendell Berry

You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough ~ Wendell Berry

The rules of evidence in the main are based on experience, logic, and common sense, less hampered by history than some parts of the substantive law. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The defense of our democracy against the forces that threaten it from without has made some of its failures to function at home glaringly apparent. ~ Wendell Willkie

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past. ~ Wendell Berry

A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy. ~ Wendell Berry

Returning from the wilderness a man becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forbears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy. ~ Wendell Berry

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting
the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun. ~ Wendell Berry

In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists. ~ Wendell Berry

Oversimplified moral certainties - always requiring hostility, always potentially violent - isolate us from mercy, pity, peace, and love and leave us lonely and dangerous. ~ Wendell Berry

Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. ~ Wendell Berry

The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business. ~ Wendell Phillips

One morning when he was about thirteen, Den and I were in the barn doing the before-breakfast chores. I was in the milking stall, Den in the driveway.
He must have been thinking about Maury, for after a while he said, "Dad, Maury Telleen is not very tall. Did you ever notice that?"
"Yes," I said. And probably I was about to tell him he should mind his manners, but he wasn't finished.
He said, "But you never think of him as a little man. Did you ever notice that?"
"Yes," I said. "I have noticed that. ~ Wendell Berry

It is possible, I think, to say that ... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill. ~ Wendell Berry

Health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through toil. ~ Wendell Phillips

I'm all right."

I was telling the truth. I was all right. I was going to live right on.

The house slowly filled up with silence. Nathan's absence came into it and filled it. I suffered by hard joy, I gave my thanks, I cried my cry. And then I turned again to that other world I had taught myself to know, the world that is neither past nor to come , the present world where we are alive together and love keeps us. ~ Wendell Berry

There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Love changes, and in change is true. ~ Wendell Berry

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. ~ Wendell Berry

It is possible, as I have learned again and again, to be in one's place, in such company, wild or domestic, and with such pleasure, that one cannot think of another place that one would prefer to be - or of another place at all. One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simply all, and is enough. Such times give one the chief standard and the chief reason for one's work. ~ Wendell Berry

We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods. ~ Wendell Berry

The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums. Granting the frailty, and no doubt the impermanence, of modern technology as a human contrivance, the man who can keep a fire in a stove or on a hearth is not only more durable, but wiser, closer to the meaning of fire, than the man who can only work a thermostat. ~ Wendell Berry

Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you'd left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth. ~ Wendell Berry

Why is it that medical strictures and recommendations so often work in favor of food processors and against food producers? Why, for example, do we so strongly favor the pasteurization of milk to health and cleanliness in milk production? (Gene Logsdon correctly says that the motive here "is monopoly, not consumer's health.") ~ Wendell Berry

There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics. ~ Wendell Berry

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. ~ Wendell Berry

Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship. ~ Wendell Berry

Well you seem like you're enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I'd help you out with that... There's a difference between pain and suffering,' Wendell says, 'You're going to have to feel pain- everyone feels pain at times- but you don't have to suffer so much. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering ~ Lori Gottlieb