Wendell Berry Quotes

I'm constantly humbled.

The earth incites the wonder and admiration of man even though he is imperfect and his understanding greatly limited.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

It's a wonderful thing to have life and to look at all this creation and say thank you. I even say it on stage.

I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.

We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.

The landscape painter must walk in the fields with a humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see Nature in all her beauty.

The fact that some things are mysterious or that they touch on mystery isn't in some way a capitulation, and one should realize that there are some things that we may never understand and, to that extent, should be humbled by that.

Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. (from “Mysteries, Yes”)

For me, the massiveness of what I don't know is one way I experience God. It creates in me a feeling of humility and a sense of gratitude.

The more sure you are, the more wrong you can be.

Don't criticize nature, stand in awe of it.

She knew this music--knew it down to the very core of her being--but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed.

The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

Hence that dread and amazement with which as Scripture uniformly relates holy men were struck and overwhelmed whenever they beheld the presence of God. Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance until they have.

The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.

It is more reverent to believe in the works of the Deity than to comprehend them.

If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists.

I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It.

Worship is to feel in the heart . . . it is an attitude and a state of mind. It is a sustained act, subject to varying degrees of intensity and perfection . . . Real worship is, among other things, a feeling about the Lord our God . . . It is in our hearts. And we must be willing to express it in an appropriate manner. If we love the Lord and are led by His Holy Spirit, our worship will always bring a delighted sense of admiring awe and a sincere humility on our part.

I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens.

We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.

And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, “Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

And the only people I fear are those who never have doubts... Save us all from arrogant men, and all the causes they're for.