Wendell Berry Quotes

When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises - because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning.

Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of meaning.

It is the apparent plan of nature that as one human being, so also one generation, and also one nationality learn, learn incessantly, from and with the others, until all have comprehended the difficult lesson: No nationality has been solely designated by God as the chosen people of the earth; above all we must seek the truth and cultivate the garden of the common good. Hence no nationality of Europe may separate itself sharply, and foolishly say, "With us alone, with us dwells all wisdom.

If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

This world is nothing except it tend to another.

Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me - the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love - He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us - nature did it all - not the gods of the religions.

We are the gods of the atoms that make up ourselves but we are also the atoms of the gods that make up the universe.

I am thoroughly convinced that no individual or nation can live by holding itself apart from the community of others. Give and take is the law; and if India wants to raise herself once more, it is absolutely necessary that she brings out her treasures and throws them broadcast among the nations of the earth, and in return be ready to receive what others have to give her. Expansion is life, contraction is death. Love is life, and hatred is death. We commenced to die the day we began to hate other races; and nothing can prevent our death unless we come back to expansion, which is life.

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

Without God man has no reference point to define himself.

Individual success is a myth. No one succeeds all by herself.

We need each other to do things that we can't do for ourselves. If we are intimately connected with each other, we just give things to each other; if we don't know each other we find another way to handle it. If you think about it, each according to his or her abilities and each according to his or her needs is sort of the same thing as supply and demand.

If we were good at everything we would have no need for each other.

All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth which is not related to something or other.

Synergy is the highest activity of life; it creates new untapped alternatives; it values and exploits the mental, emotional, and psychological differences between people.

One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath.

We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?

We are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live his life for himself alone.

Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going.

No enterprise can exist for itself alone.

You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.

Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

Cycling, cycling forever bear, wolf, caribou. When had it all started, where will it end? We are all part of one, from such simple beginnings and yet all so different. Yet one. One and again.

The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.