Wendell Berry Quotes

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

Before we met, I'd fly for hours to clear my head," Bones said, his voice reaching me even over the rush of wind. "It was the closest I came to finding peace, but though several of my mates could fly, I always went alone. I never wanted to share this with anyone until you.

He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.

I am often asked if I am not lonely on my solitary excursions. It seems so self-evident that one cannot be lonesome where everything is wild and beautiful and busy and steeped with God that the question is hard to answer.

I am not a conventionally religious man, but in the wilderness I have come closest to finding myself and knowing the universe and accepting God - by which I mean accepting all that I don't know.

I like mountains and oceans and stuff, which is where I've always felt some sort of power of meaning, but that's not necessarily spiritual.

I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world.

The only place I've felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There's something in the water there that connects me to that place. There's also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I've never been able to shake.

Me, I'm spiritually retarded, I need to be knee deep in water with a fly rod in my hands, that's about as close to God as I get.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.

The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.

I found my faith to be more about my belief, my spirituality, about nature.

I like nothing more than walking down a country lane or along a mountain path - it's not proof that there is anything bigger than ourselves, but I feel very much at peace.

In the woods we return to reason and faith.

Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth and the Great Silence alone.

Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.

Remember that hate is not the opposite of love as people think. Hate is love standing upside down; it is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is fear. In love one expands, in fear one shrinks. In fear one becomes closed, in love one opens. In fear one doubts, in love one trusts. In fear one is left lonely. In love one disappears; hence there is no question of loneliness at all. Love is when you have known your inner sky. There is no higher religion than love

It is right that you have to have a tolerance for solitude. But when that solitude bears fruit, you can abandon it. You can be in the company of others.

The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers [and Sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.

Now I am past all comforts here, but prayer.

Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition.

If you want inner peace, find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.

I am happiest in the brush and by myself - whether that's the woods of northern Minnesota or the wilds of Alaska behind a dogteam, picking through the foothills of the mountains by my ranch in New Mexico on horseback, or on the ship of my sailboat on the Pacific - so I guess it made sense to me that both Brian and Samuel would find their challenges and adventures, if that's what you call them, in the woods.

Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night.