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No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.

Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
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Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
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Tithe
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More quotes by Wendell Berry

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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
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We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.
Wendell Berry
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Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life stay away from screens.
Wendell Berry
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As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.
Wendell Berry
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But we can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present. For the amelioration of the future condition of our kind we must look, not to the wealth or the genius of the coming generations, but to the quality of the disciplines and attitudes that we are preparing now for their use.
Wendell Berry
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Action can only be understood in relation to place only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.
Wendell Berry
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The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.
Wendell Berry
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Returning from the wilderness a man becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forbears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.
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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In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.
Wendell Berry
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O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.
Wendell Berry
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Love changes, and in change is true.
Wendell Berry
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The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.
Wendell Berry
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But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it.
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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In order to survive, a plurality of true communities would require not egalitarianism and tolerance but knowledge, an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect. Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.
Wendell Berry
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
Wendell Berry
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Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.
Wendell Berry
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An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
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