Quotes by Wendell Berry

Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.

It may be when we not longer know what to do,
     we have come to our real work,
And that when we no longer know what way to go,
     we have begun our real journey

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, And that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. "

Eating with the fullest pleasure –pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance –is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.  In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our

real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have

begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings."

The Earth is what we all have in common.

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

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.  A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free