Quote

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.

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
True
Seek
Ugliness
Cannot
Disease
Neighbors
Truth
Failing
Nevertheless
Whole
Poverty
Badly
Affectionately
Enough
Deal
Belongs
Retaliate
Deals
Task
Gravely
Land
Neighbor
Responsibly
Alone
Tasks
Offend

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
Wendell Berry
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What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.
Wendell Berry
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A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
Wendell Berry
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The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.
Wendell Berry
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We need to confront honestly the issue of scale... You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.
Wendell Berry
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I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
Wendell Berry
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There is a religious principle: Love thy neighbour as thyself. But it's also an economic asset. If you've got a neighbour, you've got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbours, you can't have a limitless growth economy. You have to prefer to have a neighbour rather than to own your neighbour farm.
Wendell Berry
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Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Wendell Berry
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The developed nations had given to the free market the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.
Wendell Berry
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But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time...of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here...It is in the world, but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.
Wendell Berry
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A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.
Wendell Berry
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You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.
Wendell Berry
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We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.
Wendell Berry
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In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
Wendell Berry
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The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.
Wendell Berry
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We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.
Wendell Berry
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For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.
Wendell Berry
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Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.
Wendell Berry
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You're making the grant of affection, forbearance, mercy, out of your own experience and, of course, out of cultural tradition. You're saying, to use the well-worn analogy, if I love my children, that puts me under obligation to assume that other people love theirs.
Wendell Berry
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Do not tax your life with forethought of grief.
Wendell Berry