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

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
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Analogies have tied things together for me, personally. The fundamental one for me is the analogy between your relationship to your spouse and your relationship to your place. Both need to be a settled commitment and both involve continuous learning and adjusting.
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Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
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When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.
Wendell Berry
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An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
Wendell Berry
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You cannot save the land apart from the people, or the people apart from the land.
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Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
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Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
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Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.
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People who want to see the beauty of nature from motorboats and automobiles would obviously be just as pleased, and as fully recreated, at a drive-in movie.
Wendell Berry
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We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
Wendell Berry
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A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.
Wendell Berry
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The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
Wendell Berry
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So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Wendell Berry
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Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.
Wendell Berry
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Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
Wendell Berry
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Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!
Wendell Berry
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To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
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But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.
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