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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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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Pleasure
Nature
Beautiful
Whomever
Without
Dishonor
Thing
Useful
Work
Affection
Made
Product
Make
Products

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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So friends, every day do something that won't compute.
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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It is understood that nonhuman creatures adapt to their places or they don't live. And for some reason that I can't figure out, even the biologists have excused our own species from that obligation. I think there's going to be a biological penalty to be paid for that eventually.
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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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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If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.
Wendell Berry
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Love changes, and in change is true.
Wendell Berry
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Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.
Wendell Berry
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The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
Wendell Berry
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
Wendell Berry
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We live the given life, and not the planned.
Wendell Berry
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Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Wendell Berry
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Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
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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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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A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.
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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I'd rather rely on mother nature's wisdom than man's cleverness
Wendell Berry
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
Wendell Berry
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Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.
Wendell Berry