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The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.

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
Mercy
Happen
Happens
Going
World
Cuz
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More quotes by Wendell Berry

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A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.
Wendell Berry
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Healing is impossible in loneliness it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation. (pg.99, The Body and the Earth)
Wendell Berry
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What can't be helped must be endured.
Wendell Berry
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We are living even now among punishments and ruins.
Wendell Berry
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A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.
Wendell Berry
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Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.
Wendell Berry
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The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
Wendell Berry
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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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We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Wendell Berry
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Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
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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The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.
Wendell Berry
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Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
Wendell Berry
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The reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it. We need wilderness of all kinds, large and small, public and private. Wee need to go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the presence of the unqualified and mysterious formality of Creation.
Wendell Berry
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So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Wendell Berry
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If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.
Wendell Berry
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It is understood that nonhuman creatures adapt to their places or they don't live. And for some reason that I can't figure out, even the biologists have excused our own species from that obligation. I think there's going to be a biological penalty to be paid for that eventually.
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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What I stand for is what I stand on.
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