Chuck > Chuck's Quotes

“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”
― Wendell Berry

“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
― Wendell Berry

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
― Wendell Berry

“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.”
― Wendell Berry, Farming: A Hand Book

“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”
― Wendell Berry

“It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
― wendell berry

“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
― Wendell Berry

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
― Wendell Berry

“I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.”
― Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

“I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“Especially among Christians in positions of wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus' commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective "Christian".”
― Wendell Berry, Blessed are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings of Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness

“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
― Wendell Berry, Given

“One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”
― Wendell Berry

“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.”
― Wendell Berry

“If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?”
― Wendell Berry, What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

“Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.”
― Wendell Berry

“I have always loved a window, especially an open one.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“A conscience is that still small voice that people won't listen to.”
― Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio

“If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“The promoters of the global economy...see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.”
― Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank: Essays

“The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.”
― Wendell Berry, Given

“What can't be helped must be endured.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

“The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.”
― Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

“Thinking is the most overrated human activity.”
― Wendell Berry