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I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children...

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
Given
Cherish
Nature
Bound
Children
Damage
Men
Bounds
Life
Speaking
World
Loves
Undertaken
Duty
Borrowed
Father
Fathers

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
Wendell Berry
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Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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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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Physical health doesn't exist apart from the health of other things. Health ultimately involves the community, and the community ultimately involves the place and natural life of that place, so that real health is harmony with the world.
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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An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
Wendell Berry
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Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
Wendell Berry
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I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.
Wendell Berry
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It is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever. I turn against you, I break from you, I turn to you. We hurt, and are hurt, and have each other for healing. It is healing. It is never whole.
Wendell Berry
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The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
Wendell Berry
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Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
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. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Wendell Berry
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There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.
Wendell Berry
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We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.
Wendell Berry
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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.
Wendell Berry
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A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
Wendell Berry
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It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Wendell Berry