Quote

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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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Employed
Streams
Journey
Longer
Impeded
May
Baffled
Real
Sings
Mind
Begun
Way
Stream

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope. What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.
Wendell Berry
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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
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
Wendell Berry
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It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.
Wendell Berry
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I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
Wendell Berry
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The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
Wendell Berry
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Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
Wendell Berry
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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
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We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.
Wendell Berry
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Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!
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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You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.
Wendell Berry
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The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.
Wendell Berry
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Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.
Wendell Berry
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We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.
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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But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free.
Wendell Berry
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Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Wendell Berry
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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
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The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
Wendell Berry