Wendell Berry Quotes

As long as we are persistence in our pursuit of our deepest destiny, we will continue to grow. We cannot choose the day or time when we will fully bloom. It happens in its own time.

Each day has its own destiny. Yesterday is history, today is opportunity while tomorrow is mystery.

~There are moments when I feel like I have a looong road ahead of me, with college and dating and driving and all of that. But then I realize it just means that I have so much time left to enjoy my kids. And it really does go by so quickly.~

Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control. Stop aspiring to be anyone other than your own best self: for that does fall within your control.

I believe that the Lord has a plan for each of us that's better than anything we can imagine, even if that plan isn't obvious to us at every stage. He prepared me for this over a long period of time - in lower-profile locker rooms and the grocery store and in Europe, through all the personal tragedies and in spite of the people who doubted me along the way.

Learn from the past, prepare for the future, live in the present.

Childhood decisions do not have to define you.

That wonderful and terribly frightening journey of self-discovery. That process of growth, of being an independent person, of learning who you are and what you want from life, is the real secret of life, happiness and beauty.

Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.

...I'm thirteen years old, and I think I'm at the crossroads of my life. I've got to make good between now and the time I'm twenty, and I have only seven years to do it in. Besides, I'm the father of my family and I've got to earn all the money I can.

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.

This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life.

Sometimes you wish you could go back and ask your teachers again to guide you; but up there onstage, exactly where they always wanted you to be, you must simply find your way. They have given all the help they can; the only person who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is you.

It doesn't matter who you are, or where you come from, or how much money you've got in your pocket. You have your own destiny and your own life ahead of you.

Train the body and develop stamina and endurance. But the spirit of competition and power that presides over them is not good, it reflects a distorted vision of life. The root of the martial arts is not there.

Everybody who made it through adolescence is a hero.

Many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow.

I gradually stopped wondering, ‘What life do I have?' and began to consider, ‘What life can I build?

I realize now how much courage it takes to choose the life you want, whatever that might be.

I'd say imagine that you wake up one morning when you're going through a midlife crisis. You're getting divorced. Your kids won't speak to you. Their faces are covered with acne, and you have to decide why you should get out of bed. That's the career you should pick. The one that keeps you going no matter what, even if your life is falling apart. That's how I feel about my career.

Sometimes you are lifted up to the mountaintop as a gift from the universe, so you can see what is possible. Then you are put down back at the bottom: Now you have to earn it for yourself.

...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates

It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.