Wendell Berry Quotes

This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.

Two years ago, I was saying as I planted seeds in the garden, "I must believe in these seeds, that they fall into the earth and grow into flowers and radishes and beans." It is a miracle to me because I do not understand it. The very fact that they use glib technical phrases does not make it any less a miracle, and a miracle we all accept. Then why not accept God's miracles?

Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

Life has its dimensions in the mysterious.

The older I get, the more I believe in what I can't explain or understand, even more than the things that are explainable and understandable.

I have come to realize that God is sovereign, and there are things I just don't understand.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity.

I welcome the powers of the unknown.

Life is a mystery: you've just got to go with it.

Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand.

Give your approval to all you cannot understand.

God: personified incomprehensibility.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

I dont think that we're meant to understand it all the time. I think that sometimes we just have to have faith.

I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.

Religion and philosophy have their value, but in the end all we can do is open to mystery and live a path with heart

A way of life which excludes the realm of the unknown and the mysterious is simply not in harmony with life itself.

Religion is not based on belief or faith: religion is based on awe, religion is based on wonder. Religion is based on the mysterious that is your surround. To feel it, to be aware of it, to see it, open your eyes and drop the dust of the ages. Clean your mirror! and see what beauty surrounds you, what tremendous grandeur goes on knocking at your doors. Why are you sitting with closed eyes? Why are you sitting with such long faces? Why can't you dance? and why can't you laugh?

but perhaps we should love what we cannot understand

In the end, we know God as unknown.

Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.

Some things aren't meant to be known. Only believed.