Wendell Berry Quotes About Nature

Quotes about: Nature

• 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)

• Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Memories, Party

• When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Stars, Children

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.79, Counterpoint Press

• 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

• I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children...

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Children, Father

  "The Unforeseen Wilderness : An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge". Book by Wendell Berry, 1971.

• One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Garden, Race

• Our Children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience, or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water come from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Children, Book

• 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

• I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Healing, Tree

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.133, Counterpoint Press

• We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, War, Simplicity

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

• From a human point of view, the difference between the mind of a human and that of a mountain goat is wonderful; from the point of view of the infinite ignorance that surrounds us, the difference is not impressive. Indeed, from that point of view, the goat may have the better mind, for he is more congenially adapted to his place, and he would not endanger his species or his planet for the sake of an idea.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Ignorance, Animal

• We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Race, Quality

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.137, Counterpoint

• It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Humility, Animal

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.20, Counterpoint

• 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

  Nature, Believe, Animal

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.202, Counterpoint Press

• People who want to see the beauty of nature from motorboats and automobiles would obviously be just as pleased, and as fully recreated, at a drive-in movie.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, People, Want

• 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.

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