Quote

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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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Speak
Isolated
Sense
Contradiction
Place
Creatures
Believe
Terms
Membership
Health
Fullest
Term
Unit
Community
Units
Individual
Smallest

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
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It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
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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
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A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.
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I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.
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Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.
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Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
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What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
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All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.
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Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!
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Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.
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To me, an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts.
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I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.
Wendell Berry
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and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.
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We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
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To accept that there is nothing to do is to despair. It is to become in some fundamental way less than human. Those of us who are protesting are protesting in part for our own sake to keep ourselves whole as human beings.
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You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.
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So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.
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Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.
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It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.
Wendell Berry