Quote

A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.

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
Heart
Passively
Way
Pointless
Life
Luxury
Practice
Values
Another
Change
Without
Consumptive

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.
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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It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.
Wendell Berry
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An agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking & good eating
Wendell Berry
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Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.
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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As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no intellectual property, and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.
Wendell Berry
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You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough
Wendell Berry
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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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If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
Wendell Berry
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And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present
Wendell Berry
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Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
Wendell Berry
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A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.
Wendell Berry
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And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
Wendell Berry
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I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
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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I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.
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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When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.
Wendell Berry
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For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.
Wendell Berry