Wendell 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.

What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action. — Wendell Phillips

The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition. — Wendell Berry

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

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

People who blame the Bible for the modern destruction of nature have failed to see its delight in the variety and individuality of creatures and its insistence upon their holiness. But that delight-in, say, the final chapters of Job or the 104th Psalm-is far more useful to the cause of conservation than the undifferentiating abstractions of science ... Reverence gives standing to creatures, and to our perception of them, just as the law gives standing to a citizen. — Wendell Berry

The people who benefit from this state of affairs have been at pains to convince us that the agricultural practices and policies that have almost annihilated the farming population have greatly benefited the population of food consumers. But more and more consumers are now becoming aware that our supposed abundance of cheap and healthful food is to a considerable extent illusory. — Wendell Berry

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

All I needed was to be alone and quiet and in the dark, so that my mind could concentrate itself of fearful things, and it could not be unconcentrated sometimes until daylight. — Wendell Berry

Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment. — Wendell Phillips

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

My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family. — George Edward Woodberry

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

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility, I think whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor; you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity. — Wendell Berry

The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal. — Wendell Berry

Having hope is hard; harder when you get older. — Wendell Berry

When the mind's an empty room
The clear days come. — Wendell Berry

Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous. — Wendell Berry

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes. — Wendell Berry

It is better to buy from a small, privately owned local store than from a chain store. It is better to buy a good product than a bad one. Do not buy anything you don't need. Do as much as you can for yourself. If you cannot do something for yourself, see if you have a neighbor who can do it for you. Do everything you can to see that your money stays as long as possible in the local community. — 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

It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles. — Wendell Phillips

The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but still they liked it. — 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

It is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world. — 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

Troy went into debt and bought his new equipment because he didn't want to be held back by demanding circumstances. — Wendell Berry

We live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory. — Wendell Berry

She seems to give a respectful credence to the statement that "God is love"only to hurry on to explore with real interest the possibility that "God is wrath." She can read from the book of Revelation with a ringing conviction in her voice that can make the creation seem only a stage setting for the triumphant thunderation of end. — Wendell Berry

She would do a mans work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time she wore them long. the girls of her day I think must have been like well wrapped gifts to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. 'Well! What's this!? — Wendell Berry

Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake. — Wendell Phillips

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here. — Wendell Berry

It's the impeded stream that sings — Wendell Berry

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The Amen of nature is always a flower. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

To accept that there is nothing to do is to despair. It is to become in some fundamental way less than human. Those of us who are protesting are protesting in part for our own sake to keep ourselves whole as human beings. — Wendell Berry

Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Power is every stealing from the many to the few. — Wendell Phillips

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn. — Wendell Berry

The best servant does his work unseen. — Oliver Wendell Holmes

The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts. — Wendell Berry

I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. "Buy a car," it says, "and be free. Buy a boat and be free." Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself? — Wendell Berry

In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together? — Wendell Berry

We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be. — Wendell Berry

Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm. — Wendell Phillips

It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole. — Wendell Berry

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's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit. — Wendell Berry

Oikonomia is the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run. Chrematistics is the art of maximizing the accumulation by individuals of abstract exchange value in the form of money in the short run. — Wendell Berry

THE ARRIVAL Like a tide it comes in, wave after wave of foliage and fruit, the nurtured and the wild, out of the light to this shore. In its extravagance we shape the strenuous outline of enough. — Wendell Berry

Modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. Wendell Berry — Wendell Berry

If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are. — Wendell Berry

War? War is an organized bore. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence. — Wendell Berry

It's called a repository spell. Makes something bigger on the inside than on the outside. Works great for bags, barrels, hats, just about anything really, even a 1963 police box. — Chuck

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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

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

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.

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 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

All the episodes from my stories and novels are not about food only, but about meals. You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving. — 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

As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life. — Wendell Berry

Man has his will, but woman has her way. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress. — Wendell Phillips

Politicians are like the bones of a horse's foreshoulder-not a straight one in it. — 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 concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment"
that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound division between it an ourselves. We have given up the understanding
dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought
that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than they other. — Wendell Berry

Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet? — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, as money. A man's learning dies with him, as does his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since ...
I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies. — Wendell Berry

The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986) — Wendell Berry

He went through the old motions of his life, taking care of what needed caring for, keeping mostly quiet about what was on his mind. But his hard waiting changed him; you could see it in his face. — Wendell Berry

Willing to die you give up your will; keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move. — 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

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