Wendell B Quotes & Sayings

Why can't somebody give us a list of things everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of the things that everybody says but nobody thinks? — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Romance means believing you are worthy of a happy ending. — Sarah Wendell

Old age is fifteen years older than I am. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

There is much good work to be done by every one of us and we must begin to do it. — Wendell Berry

The Luddites ... asserted the precedence of community needs over technological innovation and monetary profit; ... The victory of industrialism over Luddism was overwhelming and unconditional; it was undoubtedly the most complete, significant, and lasting victory of modern times. ... To this day, if you say you would be willing to forbid, restrict, or reduce the use of technological devices in order to protect the community -- or to protect the good health of nature on which the community depends -- you will be calle4d a Luddite, and it will not be a compliment. ... Technological determinism has triumphed. — Wendell Berry

Thinking is the most overrated human activity. — Wendell Berry

The second reason for the failure of industrial agriculture is its wastefulness. In natural or biological systems, waste does not occur. And it is easy to produce examples of nonindustrial human cultures in which waste was or is virtually unknown. All that is sloughed off in the living arc of a natural cycle remains within the cycle; it becomes fertility, the power of life to continue. In nature death and decay are as necessary - are, one may almost say, as lively - as life; and so nothing is wasted. There is really no such thing, then, as natural production; in nature, there is only reproduction. But — Wendell Berry

Grandpa's farm had belonged to our people ever since there had been a farm in that place, or people to own a farm. Grandpa's father had left it to Grandpa and his other sons and daughters. But Grandpa had borrowed money and bought their shares. He had to have it whole hog or none, root hog or die, or he wouldn't have it at all. — Wendell Berry

The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability to do something well
to do good work for good reasons. In order to be good you have to know how
and this knowing is vast, complex, humble and humbling; it is of the mind and of the hands, of neither alone. — Wendell Berry

The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm. — Wendell Berry

They ended up at the Old Corner Bookstore, which Brian had read about in a tour guide to Boston. "Longfellow and Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes used to read here. Let's go in." Brian nudged the girls until they obeyed.
It was a regular bookstore, less history-minded than Brian had expected. In fact, the local history shelves were quite mangeable. I'll buy one book, he thought. This will get me launched in actual reading. Out of the zillions of choices, I'll find one here.
Brian picked out Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. It was thick and somehow exciting, with its chapter headings and scholarly notes and bibliography. — Caroline B. Cooney

This undoubtedly accounts for my sense of shock when, on my first visit to Duke University, and by surprise, I came face-to-face with James B. Duke in his dignity, his glory perhaps, as the founder of that university. He stands imperially in bronze in front of a Methodist chapel aspiring to be a cathedral. He holds between two fingers of his left hand a bronze cigar. On one side of his pedestal is the legend: INDUSTRIALIST. On the other side is another single word: PHILANTHROPIST. The man thus commemorated seemed to me terrifyingly ignorant, even terrifyingly innocent, of the connection between his industry and his philanthropy. But I did know the connection. I felt it instantly and physically. The connection was my grandparents and thousands of others more or less like them. If you can appropriate for little or nothing the work and hope of enough such farmers, then you may dispense the grand charity of "philanthropy. — Wendell Berry

The economic hardship of my family and of many others, a century ago, was caused by a monopoly, the American Tobacco Company, which had eliminated all competitors and thus was able to reduce as it pleased the prices it paid to farmers. The American Tobacco Company was the work of James B. Duke of Durham, North Carolina, and New York City, who, disregarding any other consideration, followed a capitalist logic to absolute control of his industry and, incidentally, of the economic fate of thousands of families such as my own. — Wendell Berry

I mean sleeping with you was plan B. Dewey jumped the gun on that one, though I can't say as I blame him. If I were in his shoes, I'm not sure I would have even bothered with plan A." (Wendell) — Marshall Thornton

There is another difference between my grandfather and James B. Duke that may finally be more important than any other, and this was a difference of kinds of pleasure. We may assume that, as a boomer, moving from one chance of wealth to another, James B. Duke wanted only what he did not yet have. If it is true that he was in this way typical of his kind, then his great pleasure was only in prospect, which excludes affection as a motive. My grandfather, on the contrary, and despite his life's persistent theme of hardship, took a great and present delight in the modest good that was at hand: in his place and his affection for it, in its pastures, animals, and crops. — Wendell Berry

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced. — Wendell Berry

Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We live under a government of men and morning newspapers. — Wendell Phillips

We live the given life, and not the planned. — Wendell Berry

Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them! — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible ... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world. — Wendell Berry

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

In the absence of a widely practiced and capable attention to our use of the land, to the land-use economies, and to the natural sources of our life, we have a national, or global, economy consisting entirely of capital (rated at monetary value), minimal labor ("jobs," merely numbered, and the numbers always liable to reduction by technology), information (infinite perhaps, but never sufficient), marketing (seduction of the gullible), and consumption (conversion of goods into waste or poison). And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one's country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country. Under — Wendell Berry

Christianity is a battle not a dream. — Wendell Phillips

Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him No. But if anyone asks you will a Negro fight, tell him Yes! — Wendell Phillips

The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten. — Wendell Berry

The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm. — Wendell Berry

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation./He went flying down the river in his boat/with his video camera to his eye, making/a moving picture of the moving river/ ... [At the end of his vacation,]/With a flick of the switch, there it would be./But he would not be in it. He would never be in it. — Wendell Berry

The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life. — Wendell Berry

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men
from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

It is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise human power. This, as I think Martin Luther King understood, is the real point, the real gift to America, of the struggle of the black people. In accepting the humanity of the black race, the white people will not be giving accommodation to an alien people; it will be receiving into itself half of its own experience, vital and indispensable to it, which it has so far denied at great cost. — Wendell Berry

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years. — Wendell Willkie

One way to demonstrate courtship as a matter of course in an established relationship is to remember that courtship is the act of trying to persuade someone to choose you - by demonstrating that you've chosen them. If you look at each day of your relationship as another opportunity to choose to be with the person you're with, you'll display those feelings of affection in your actions and your words - and you'll refrain from taking that person's presence for granted. — Sarah Wendell

And I declare myself free
from ignorant love. You easy lovers
and forgivers of mankind, stand back!
I will love you at a distance,
and not because you deserve it.
My love must be descriminate
or fail to bear its weight. — Wendell Berry

We are alive within mystery, by miracle ... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say. — Wendell Berry

He was all show, and he had the conviction, as such people do, that show is the same as substance. He didn't think he was fooling other people; he had fooled himself. — Wendell Berry