Quote

I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men.

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
Way
Lack
Things
Grace
Never
Fire
Men
Simple
Lighted
World
Peace
Wholly
Place
Sell
Find
Burning
Self
Sells

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together.
Wendell Berry
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But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time...of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here...It is in the world, but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.
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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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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Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
Wendell Berry
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We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. (pg. 43, The Unsettling of America)
Wendell Berry
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It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.
Wendell Berry
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There are no unsacred places there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
Wendell Berry
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To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.
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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The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an object. This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.
Wendell Berry
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The only true and effective operator's manual for spaceship earth is not a book that any human will ever write it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.
Wendell Berry
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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
Wendell Berry
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So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.
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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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
Wendell Berry
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If you eat, you are involved in agriculture.
Wendell Berry
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We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.
Wendell Berry
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The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
Wendell Berry
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If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?
Wendell Berry