Wendell Berry Quotes About Past

Quotes about: Past

• The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspirational, Wise, Memories

  Wendell Berry (2011). “Standing by Words”, p.14, Counterpoint Press

• 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

  Past, Needs, Assumption

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.121, Counterpoint

• The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest. In the cleared fields where he gardens and pastures his horses it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Horse, Past

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.93, Counterpoint Press

• The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

  Wendell Berry

  Past, Hatred, Innovation

• The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflied that fly up in flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.

  Wendell Berry

  Morning, Children, Past

• If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.

  Wendell Berry

  Christian, Taken, Past

• It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.

  Wendell Berry

  Past, Life Is, Ifs

  Wendell Berry (2012). “The Long-Legged House”, p.189, Counterpoint Press

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