Quote

The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

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
Power
Steam
Must
Experts
Great
Pick
Way
Picks
Shovel
Would
Rule
Shovels
Prove
Dime
Use
Dimes
Seems
Acknowledged

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Wendell Berry
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If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.
Wendell Berry
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The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
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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Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
Wendell Berry
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The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that to work is to pray. (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)
Wendell Berry
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It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.
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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After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.
Wendell Berry
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The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.
Wendell Berry
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I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)
Wendell Berry
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I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.
Wendell Berry
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It may be that when we no longer know... which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Wendell Berry
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And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
Wendell Berry
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Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
Wendell Berry
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What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
Wendell Berry
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We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.
Wendell Berry
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I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.
Wendell Berry
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I dream of a quiet man / who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows / where the rarest wildflowers / are blooming, and who goes, / and finds that he is smiling / not by his own will.
Wendell Berry
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No individual life is an end in itself. One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can live fully only by making ourselves answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time.
Wendell Berry