The Gift of Good Land Quotes

“We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.”
― Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

“We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”
― Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

“The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person's moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship. And stewardship is hopeless and meaningless unless it involves long-term courage, perseverance, devotion, and skill. This skill is not to be confused with any accomplishment or grace of spirit or of intellect. It has to do with everyday proprieties in the practical use and care of the created things - with "right livelihood.”
― Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

“Satisfaction rises out of the flow of time.”
― Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

“A nuclear reactor is a proposed "solution" to "the energy problem." But like all big-technological "solutions," this one "solves" a single problem by causing many...
A garden, on the other hand, is a solution that leads to other solutions. It is a part of the limitless pattern of good health and good sense.”
― Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

“And this habit of assigning a higher value to what might be than to what is has stayed with us, so that we have continued to sacrifice the health of our land and of our own communities to the abstract values of money making and industrialism.”
― Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural