Quote

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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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Live
Plant
Inches
Harvested
Every
Build
Invest
Prophesy
Years
Return
Forest
Crop
Thousand
Forests
Millennium
Tree
Trees
Crops
Call
Leaves
Mold
Faith
Main
Returns
Humus
Two
Profit
Harvest
Rotted

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.
Wendell Berry
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Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.
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Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in justice or in affirmation of rights or in defense of peace do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.
Wendell Berry
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These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
Wendell Berry
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Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.
Wendell Berry
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Our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land
Wendell Berry
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
Wendell Berry
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I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
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If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
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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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When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.
Wendell Berry
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You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
Wendell Berry
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Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
Wendell Berry
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Eating is an agricultural act.
Wendell Berry
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The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.
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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If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.
Wendell Berry
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A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
Wendell Berry
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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
Wendell Berry
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You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
Wendell Berry