Wendell Berry Quotes

I'm a normal consumer but try to do the best I can. I try to buy locally, and I mostly avoid supermarkets.

I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.

I represent a rural state and live in a small town. Small merchants make up the majority of Vermont's small businesses and thread our state together. It is the mom-and-pop grocers, farm-supply stores, coffee shops, bookstores and barber shops where Vermonters connect, conduct business and check in on one another.

I shop once in six months. My friends often point at my shoes to tell me that they've worn out. It's embarrassing, but it doesn't affect me too much. I shop when I have to.

Everyone was poor. We were satisfied with a life that was simple and humble. We were a peaceful, open people.

Some of the most green people in our lives are our parents and grandparents, who always bought locally and carefully. I remember my grandmother would buy a jar of cream and make it last for a long time. To me, that is just as green as something with an expensive, eco-savvy label on it.

I'm not really worried about the flashy stuff. I don't got chains and cars. I spend what I need to spend. It doesn't faze me.

A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.

If you calculate every single thing you could possibly need in your life, you would need no more than 200 people to keep all that afloat: a doctor, food, wine, cheese-eating friends, the person who makes paper, the shoemaker.

People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities.

I don't buy much. Almost buy nothing. I buy what I need, do it the easiest way possible.

No one may forsake their neighbors when they are in trouble. Everybody is under obligation to help and support their neighbors as they would themselves like to be helped.

Rather than earn money, it was Thoreau's idea to reduce his wants so that he would not need to buy anything. As he went around preaching this ingenious idea, the shopkeepers of Concord hoped he would drop dead.

Avoid the philosophy and excuse that yesterday's luxuries have become today's necessities. They aren't necessities unless we ourselves make them such. . . . It is essential for us to live within our means.

Some of the homes that have been built in the last 10 years just appall me. Why do humans need huge homes? I was born poor and I didn’t know you bought clothes at anything but the Goodwill until I went to college. Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.

I drive old cars, all my Patagonia clothes are years and years old, I hardly have anything new. I try to lead a very simple life. I am not a consumer of anything. And I much prefer sleeping on somebody's floor than in a motel room.

Live below your means but within your needs.

If we have the khadi spirit in us, then we should surround ourselves with simplicity in every walk of life.

My manner of living is plain and I do not mean to be put out of it. A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready.

I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.

In order to prove a friend to one's guests, frugality must reign in one's meals; and, according to an ancient saying, one must eat to live, not live to eat.

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

We know that if you have $20 million, it's better to buy a van Gough print than it is buy an executive jet, from the point of view of the environment. But when you start getting down, it's like the recycling question: What are things we can really afford to do, and how much pleasure do we get out of them? We haven't even started to have that discussion, and it's getting awfully late.

I'd like to live off the band, but if not, I'll just retire to Mexico or Yugoslavia with a few hundred dollars, grow potatoes, and learn the history of rock through back issues of Creem magazine.