Quote

When despair for the world grows in me... I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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
World
Water
Despair
Light
Blind
Stills
Rest
Still
Grace
Come
Grows
Feel
Stars
Herons
Feels
Waiting
Forethought
Time
Free
Presence

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things it means putting first things first.
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Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.
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Don't pray for the rain to stop pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.
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The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
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The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.
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Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.
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One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.
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To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.
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The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.
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Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.
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There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.
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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The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
Wendell Berry
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We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.
Wendell Berry
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The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.
Wendell Berry
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It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.
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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.
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The industrial mind is a mind without compunction it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986)
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The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.
Wendell Berry