Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.

  Wendell Berry

  Make Sense

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• Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

  Wendell Berry

  Life, Alive, Never Forget

  "Life Is A Miracle : An Essay Against Modern Superstition". Book by Wendell Berry, 2000.

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• It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

  Wendell Berry

  People, Wish, Division

  Wendell Berry (2001). “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition”, Counterpoint Press

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• So friends, every day do something that won't compute.

  Wendell Berry

  Simplicity

  Wendell Berry (2013). “A Country of Marriage: Poems”, p.16, Counterpoint Press

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• The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. (pg. 326, The Pleasures of Eating)

  Wendell Berry

  Morning, Memories, Garden

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.151, Counterpoint Press

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• There's a world of difference . . . between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.

  Wendell Berry

  Life, Data, Differences

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• Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

  Wendell Berry

  Freedom, Heart, Thinking

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.62, Counterpoint Press

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• I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.

  Wendell Berry

  Believe, Ignorance, Weakness

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.114, Counterpoint Press

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• We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

  Wendell Berry

  Children, Ocean, Lakes

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.188, Counterpoint Press

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• Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'

  Wendell Berry

  Drama, Thinking, Agriculture

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.145, Counterpoint Press

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• The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

  Wendell Berry

  Moving, Technology, Hands

  "Nature as an Ally: An Interview with Wendell Berry". Interview with Sarah Leonard, www.dissentmagazine.org. Spring 2012.

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• Without a complex knowledge of one's place and without the faithfulness to one's place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or "in" group.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, May, Groups

  Wendell Berry (2012). “A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural”, p.66, Counterpoint Press

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• The reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it. We need wilderness of all kinds, large and small, public and private. Wee need to go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the presence of the unqualified and mysterious formality of Creation.

  Wendell Berry

  Needs, Unqualified, Mysterious

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• At night make me one with the darkness
  In the morning make me one with the light.

  Wendell Berry

  Morning, Night, Light

  Wendell Berry (2009). “The Mad Farmer Poems”, p.6, Counterpoint Press

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• But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

  Wendell Berry

  Future, Environmental, Guarantees

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.51, Counterpoint

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• There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.

  Wendell Berry

  Sitting, Littles, Layers

  "The Mad Farmer Lives! A Night With Wendell Berry" by Rhea St. Julien, thirtythreadbaremercies.com. October 30, 2012.

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• The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.

  Wendell Berry

  Heart, Law, People

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

  Wendell Berry

  Bread, Wheat, Live By

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

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• Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households.

  Wendell Berry

  Community, Heaven, Soul

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.319, Counterpoint

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• If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

  Wendell Berry

  Life, Death, Long

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.70, Counterpoint

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• Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspirational, Courage, Travel

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• History leaves no doubt that among of the most regrettable crimes committed by human beings have been committed by those human beings who thought of themselves as civilized. What, we must ask, does our civilization possess that is worth defending? One thing worth defending, I suggest, is the imperative to imagine the lives of beings who are not ourselves and are not like ourselves: animals, plants, gods, spirits, people of other countries, other races, people of the other sex, places and enemies.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Sex, Animal

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• Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don’t buy anything new.

  Wendell Berry

  Wendell Berry, Wesley Bates (2016). “Roots to the Earth: Poems and a Story”, p.29, Counterpoint

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• A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.

  Wendell Berry

  Home, Garden, Practice

  Wendell Berry (2017). “The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry”, p.61, Penguin UK

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• Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need more than to understand their obligation to one another and to the earth; they need also the feeling of such obligation, and the feeling can come only within the patterns of familiarity. A nation of urban nomads, such as we have become, may simply be unable to be enough disturbed by its destruction of the ecological health of the land, because the people's dependence on the land, though it has been expounded to them over and over again in general terms, is not immediate to their feelings.

  Wendell Berry

  Land, People, Feelings

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