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If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.

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
Talk
Difficult
Resolution
Right
Assumption
Must
Dialogue
Obviously
Conversation
Winning
Start

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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The developed nations had given to the free market the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.
Wendell Berry
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I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.
Wendell Berry
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I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.
Wendell Berry
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They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.
Wendell Berry
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The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
Wendell Berry
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So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
Wendell Berry
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There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.
Wendell Berry
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My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
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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The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest. In the cleared fields where he gardens and pastures his horses it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences.
Wendell Berry
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To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.
Wendell Berry
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Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.
Wendell Berry
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I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.
Wendell Berry
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All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.
Wendell Berry
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You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.
Wendell Berry
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It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
Wendell Berry
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THE WILD ROSE” – BY WENDELL BERRY Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart. Suddenly you flare again in my sight A wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was only shade And I am blessed and choose again, That which I chose before.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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From the union of power and money, from the union of power and secrecy, from the union of government and science, from the union of government and art, from the union of science and money, from the union of ambition and ignorance, from the union of genius and war, from the union of outer space and inner vacuity, the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.
Wendell Berry
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Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.
Wendell Berry