Wendell Berry Quotes About Water

Quotes about: Water

• I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.

  Wendell Berry

  Animal, Water, Tree

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.326, Counterpoint

• Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

  Wendell Berry

  Animal, Two, Water

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.54, Counterpoint

• 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

• Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.

  Wendell Berry

  Land, Space, Water

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.93, ReadHowYouWant.com

• 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

• Sit and be still
  until in the time
  of no rain you hear
  beneath the dry wind's
  commotion in the trees
  the sound of flowing
  water among the rocks,
  a stream unheard before,
  and you are where
  breathing is prayer.

  Wendell Berry

  Prayer, Rain, Rocks

  "Given". Book by Wendell Berry, 2005.

• I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.

  Wendell Berry

  Circles, Water, Tree

  Wendell Berry (2013). “This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems”, p.7, Counterpoint

• The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

  Wendell Berry

  Distance, Wine, Air

• The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air access remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

  Wendell Berry

  Military, Independent, Technology

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.16, 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

• When despair for the world grows in me...
  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

  Stars, Light, Water

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

• The Captains of Industry have always counseled the rest of us "to be realistic." Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing children, or if only it would stop buying politicians, or if only it would give women and favored minorities an equitable share of the loot?

  Wendell Berry

  Children, Air, Ecosystems

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

• With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use.

  Wendell Berry

  Money, Home, School

• And having thoughtlessly polluted our streams and rivers, we have seen in recent years a rapidly growing market for bottled drinking water. I am sure that some will say that a rapidly growing market for water is "good for the economy," and most of us are still affluent enough to pay the cost. Nevertheless, it is a considerable cost that we are now paying for drinkable water, which we once had in plentiful supply at little cost or none at all. And the increasing of the cost suggests that the time may come when the cost will be unaffordable.

  Wendell Berry

  Drinking, Years, Rivers

  Wendell Berry, Daniel Kemmis, Courtney White (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.147, Counterpoint Press

• It is a fact that the entire Kentucky River system, which the central part of the state complacently depends upon for its future water, is deteriorating rapidly because of strip mining, because of bad farming, because of industrial and agricultural pollutants, because of urban sewage. It is deteriorating, that is to say, because almost nobody cares, or cares to know, where water comes from, so long as it keeps coming.

  Wendell Berry

  Kentucky, Rivers, Long

• The assumption is that people so ignorant and thoughtless and silly and greedy may simply call upon the Army Corps of Engineers in order to receive a clean and abundant supply of water from reservoirs in the mountains. A much likelier outcome is that they will be drinking an ever stronger mixture of sewage and mine acid and mud and cropspray and various other defecations of the industrial paradise.

  Wendell Berry

  Drinking, Silly, Army

• It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil.

  Wendell Berry

  Spiritual, Thinking, Air

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.99, Counterpoint

• We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground, and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife? As a conservative, I do abhor it.

  Wendell Berry

  Air, Water, Degrees

• When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.

  Wendell Berry

  Husband, Wind, Land

• Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following, there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water. There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make; they are going down as fast as they can, but their sound seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.

  Wendell Berry

  Lakes, Sea, Fishing

• Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty. We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

  Wendell Berry

  Sleep, Dark, Love Is

  Wendell Berry (2013). “A Country of Marriage: Poems”, p.11, Counterpoint Press

• 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

• I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.

  Wendell Berry

  Believe, Land, Air

  Source: www.neh.gov

• I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle... Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight.
  What I fear in it leaves it, And the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song.

  Wendell Berry

  Song, Lying, Sight

  Wendell Berry (1998). “A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997”, Counterpoint LLC

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