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To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.

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
Merely
Limits
Knowledge
Ability
Feel
Feels
Empirical
Think
Limit
Thinking
Define

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato
Wendell Berry
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The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.
Wendell Berry
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Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
Wendell Berry
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If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.
Wendell Berry
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This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part the free world seems to be regarding it as merely normal.
Wendell Berry
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The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.
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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The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.
Wendell Berry
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Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Wendell Berry
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Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact it is not a quantity.
Wendell Berry
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When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.
Wendell Berry
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A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written.
Wendell Berry
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There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.
Wendell Berry
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The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.
Wendell Berry
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It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.
Wendell Berry
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You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
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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To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.
Wendell Berry
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To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.
Wendell Berry
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To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.
Wendell Berry