Wendell Berry Quotes

When people call this beast to mind, They marvel more and more At such a little tail behind, So large a trunk before.

<...> I’ve never believed there is any animal more dangerous than a human being. I never will. It’s the intelligence. It’s the mind that makes it so.

Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

We all have our essential nature. If you're good with numbers, you don't even know you're good with numbers because that's how your mind works.

When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.

The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.

Our minds are all different and I believe cultivating a keen introspective sensitivity is absolutely essential in discovering our potential.

To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.

Just watching an animal closely can take you out of your mind and bring you into the present moment, which is where the animal lives all the time - surrendered to life.

It is true that the reluctance to abstain from animal food, in those who have been long accustomed to its stimulus, is so great in some persons of weak minds, as to be scarcely overcome; but this is far from bringing any argument in its favour

To be reminded that one is very much like other members of the animal kingdom is often funny...though...I do not too much mind being somewhat like a cat.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.

There is the physical mind which is mechanical but the awareness which is the essential character (dharma) of the mind is also to some extent present there.

I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things which clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.

The modesty of women, which, in its most primitive form among animals, is based on sexual periodicity, is, with that periodicity, an essential condition of courtship.

Turn away from your animal kind, try to leave your body, just to live in your mind.

There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.

First, then, I say, that the mind, which we often call the intellect, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is not less an integral part of man himself, than the hand, and foot, and eyes, are portions of the whole animal.

To a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal.

The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.

All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.

Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind nor bond of society.