Wendell Berry Quotes About Earth

Quotes about: Earth

• We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?

  Wendell Berry

  Want, Succeed, Doe

  "Confronting the Consequences of Runaway Capitalism". Interview with Bill Moyers, www.alternet.org. October 7, 2013.

• The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Responsibility, Garden

  Wendell Berry (1978). “The unsettling of America: culture & agriculture”, Random House (NY)

• To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Garden, Earth Day

• The earth is what we all have in common.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Earth Day, Environmental

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.97, Counterpoint

• In this state of total consumerism-which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves-all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.

  Wendell Berry

  Meaningful, Thinking, Ideas

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.85, Counterpoint

• If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared. (pg. 59, "Racism and the Economy")

  Wendell Berry

  Real, Animal, Air

  Wendell Berry (2010). “The Hidden Wound”, p.129, Counterpoint Press

• The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

  Wendell Berry

  Book, Writing, Culture

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.152, Counterpoint Press

• 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... What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth's ability to produce.

  Wendell Berry

  Home, Garden, Practice

• Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world.

  Wendell Berry

  Taken, Thinking, Space

• ...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

  Wendell Berry

  Heart, Eye, Heaven

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.180, Counterpoint Press

• If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

  Wendell Berry

  Life, Death, Long

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.70, Counterpoint

• But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free.

  Wendell Berry

  Fall, Cutting, Roots

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.130, Counterpoint Press

• The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.

  Wendell Berry

  Lakes, Sea, Fishing

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Leavings: Poems”, p.13, Counterpoint Press

• Geese appear high over us, / pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, / as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear / in the ancient faith: what we need / is here. And we pray, not / for new earth or heaven, but to be / quiet in heart, and in eye, / clear. What we need is here.

  Wendell Berry

  Sleep, Eye, Heart

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.180, Counterpoint Press

• Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need more than to understand their obligation to one another and to the earth; they need also the feeling of such obligation, and the feeling can come only within the patterns of familiarity. A nation of urban nomads, such as we have become, may simply be unable to be enough disturbed by its destruction of the ecological health of the land, because the people's dependence on the land, though it has been expounded to them over and over again in general terms, is not immediate to their feelings.

  Wendell Berry

  Land, People, Feelings

• Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation. (pg.99, "The Body and the Earth")

  Wendell Berry

  Loneliness, Healing, Opposites

• If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even as a necessary agricultural principle but as a sacred grove - a place where the Creation is let alone, to serve as instruction, example, refuge; a place for people to go, free of work and presumption, to let themselves alone. (pg. 125, The Body and the Earth)

  Wendell Berry

  Yield, People, Generosity

• 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

  Lying, Book, Reflection

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

• If one accepts the 24th and 104th Psalms as scriptural norms, then surface mining and other forms of earth destruction are perversions. If we take the Gospels seriously, how can we not see industrial warfare - with its inevitable massacre of innocents - as a most shocking perversion? By the standard of all scriptures, neglect of the poor, of widows and orphans, of the sick, the homeless, the insane, is an abominable perversion.

  Wendell Berry

  Widows And Orphans, Sick, Insane

• A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.

  Wendell Berry

  Men, Land, Waiting

• All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.

  Wendell Berry

  Pride, Men, Rivers

  Wendell Berry (2009). “The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry”, p.29, Counterpoint Press

• We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Long, Warfare

  Wendell Berry's Commencement Address at Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Kentucky, May 14, 2005.

• The name of our proper connection to the earth is 'good work,' for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing.

  Wendell Berry

  Art, Work, Names

  Wendell Berry (1993). “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays”, Pantheon

• The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

  Wendell Berry

  Running, Long, Mountain

  Wendell Berry's Commencement Address at Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Kentucky, May 14, 2005.

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