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A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.

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
Wrong
Preserves
Rather
Precisely
Home
Soil
Persons
Garden
Undertakes
Person
Grow
Exploit
Mind
Economy
Exploits
Grows
Practices
Practice
Preserve

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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If you grow a garden you are going to shed some sweat, and you are going to spend some time bent over you will experience some aches and pains. But it is in the willingness to accept this discomfort that we strike the most telling blow against the power plants and what they represent.
Wendell Berry
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Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'
Wendell Berry
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We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods.
Wendell Berry
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Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.
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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Returning from the wilderness a man becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forbears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.
Wendell Berry
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A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
Wendell Berry
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How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Wendell Berry
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When the mind's an empty room The clear days come.
Wendell Berry
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The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves.
Wendell Berry
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A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.
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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I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.
Wendell Berry
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
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We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
Wendell Berry
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We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
Wendell Berry
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It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.
Wendell Berry
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Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world's beauty and abundance.
Wendell Berry
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The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
Wendell Berry
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People talk about job creation, as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
Wendell Berry