Quote

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Hope
Pleasing
Nature
Cherish
Earth
Environmental
Care
Worthy
Ancient
Garden
Remains
Foster
Responsibility
Renewal

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
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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 our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.
Wendell Berry
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...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
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It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.
Wendell Berry
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The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an object. This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.
Wendell Berry
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If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?
Wendell Berry
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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
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The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.
Wendell Berry
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They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, pre-chewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.
Wendell Berry
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What can't be helped must be endured.
Wendell Berry
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It's the impeded stream that sings
Wendell Berry
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I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.
Wendell Berry
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We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
Wendell Berry
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I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.
Wendell Berry
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How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves
Wendell Berry
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I would consider myself simply a critic of the market economy. My standard isn't primarily political. First of all, it's ecological. And then I get to matters that are social and cultural.
Wendell Berry
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The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.
Wendell Berry
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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
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Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
Wendell Berry
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The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
Wendell Berry