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You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction

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
Commit
Direction
Take
Life

More quotes by 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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We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.
Wendell Berry
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If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
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.
Wendell Berry
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I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.
Wendell Berry
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Be joyful because it is humanly possible.
Wendell Berry
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The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
Wendell Berry
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Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.
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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We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.
Wendell Berry
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The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.
Wendell Berry
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The earth is what we all have in common.
Wendell Berry
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Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
Wendell Berry
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Geese appear high over us, / pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, / as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear / in the ancient faith: what we need / is here. And we pray, not / for new earth or heaven, but to be / quiet in heart, and in eye, / clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
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Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.
Wendell Berry
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Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time.
Wendell Berry
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I'd rather rely on mother nature's wisdom than man's cleverness
Wendell Berry
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The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.
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 poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves.
Wendell Berry