This Day Quotes

“Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come in among these trees you must leave behind the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes. You must come without weapon or tool, alone, expecting nothing, remembering nothing, into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend. Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by Your will, not ours. And it is fit Our only choice should be to die Into that rest, or out of it.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“I know that I have life only insofar as I have love. I have no love except it come from Thee. Help me, please, to carry this candle against the wind.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“We live the given life, and not the planned.
- 1994 III”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“Having written some pages in favor of Jesus, I receive a solemn communication crediting me with the possession of a “theology” by which I acquire the strange dignity of being wrong forever or forever right. Have I gauged exactly enough the weights of sins? Have I found too much of the Hereafter in the Here? Or the other way around? Have I found too much pleasure, too much beauty and goodness, in this our unreturning world? O Lord, please forgive any smidgen of such distinctions I may have still in my mind. I meant to leave them all behind a long time ago. If I’m a theologian I am one to the extent I have learned to duck when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead, dropping their loads of whitewash at random on the faces of those who look toward Heaven. Look down, look down, and save your soul by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly indifference this off-fall of the air. Christmas night and Easter morning are this soil’s only laws. The depth and volume of the waters of baptism, the true taxonomy of sins, the field marks of those most surely saved, God’s own only interpretation of the Scripture: these would be causes of eternal amusement, could we forget how we have hated one another, how vilified and hurt and killed one another, bloodying the world, by means of such questions, wrongly asked, never to be rightly answered, but asked and wrongly answered, hour after hour, day after day, year after year—such is my belief—in Hell.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“He stands under them, looks up, sees, knows, and knows that he does not know.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“To sit and look at light-filled leaves May let us see, or seem to see, Far backward as through clearer eyes To what unsighted hope believes: The blessed conviviality That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise, Time when the Maker’s radiant sight Made radiant every thing He saw, And every thing He saw was filled With perfect joy and life and light. His perfect pleasure was sole law; No pleasure had become self-willed. For all His creatures were His pleasures”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“Like light beyond “the visible spectrum,” prayer goes up from the nursing home from this detritus, these cast aside. Ones I loved who committed the wrong, the great estrangement, of living too long, they too sent up from this foreign land, their exile, the vast supplication of extreme humanity: Help me. Help us. Help the dying to die. Help the dead to live. Maybe they have dwindled to final care, to final prayer. Maybe they have come to the final freedom, no longer wanting time, no longer wanting. From the farms and the little towns they have been gathered unto this last. Low down as its source may be, their prayer ascends, it rises as out of the grave, it is a glory of the earth. If this is not true, what do I know that is?”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“Now, surely, I am getting old, for my memory of myself as a young man seems now to be complete, as a story told. The young man leaps, and lands on an old man’s legs.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“Every day you have less reason
Not to give yourself away.
- 1993 I”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“A lamplit table spread
Old hospitality
Of cheese and wine and bread.
- 1993 V Remembering Evia”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago, Begins to grow in the spring light and rain;”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature’s world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“XII Do not live for death, pay it no fear or wonder. This is the firmest law of the truest faith. Death is the dew that wets the grass in the early morning dark. It is God’s entirely. Withdraw your fatal homage, and live.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“VI The old shepherd comes to another lambing time, and he gives thanks. He has longed ever more strongly as the weeks and months went by for the new lives the ewes have carried in their bellies through the winter cold. Now in gray early mornings of barely spring he goes to see at last what the night has revealed. Through many of its generations he has husbanded his flock, keeping every year a few promising ewe lambs to replace the old that die and those that fail, are culled, and sold. Some of any year’s crop will be better than the rest, some will be outstanding. The best he remembers from the time, as sucklings, they caught his eye. Lineages of motherhood having stayed unbroken through many years, his flock has improved, somewhat by his choosing, no doubt, but more as the farm itself has chosen them for their thriving in it, on its terms, and so they are its own. They belong by adapting to the place as the shepherd wishes to belong.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“XIII O my own small country, battered wife of my kind, made in time by life and its multiple ends, dying and rising again, you come to mere use, which is misuse by life self-estranged. Life is not of the body, For death disembodies it, and yet it suffers. Only life suffers, as you suffer use without care or thanks. They who abuse you live by your life, they thrive a while by your ruin. But now let us think instead of a husband and a wife, one flesh, whose flesh is one with their place, grace unearned, your gift, by which they are made your own.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“So what was still and dark wakes up, Becomes intelligent, moves, names Itself by hunger and by kind, Walks, swims, flies, cries, calls, speaks, or sings. We all are praising, praying to The light we are, but cannot know.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“There are two healings: nature’s, and ours and nature’s. Nature’s will come in spite of us, after us, over the graves of its wasters, as it comes to the forsaken fields. The healing that is ours and nature’s will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. Right is difficult and long. In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems