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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.

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
Forests
Main
Plant
Crop
Live
Millennium
Crops
Harvest
Invest
Forest

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
Wendell Berry
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You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
Wendell Berry
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Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
Wendell Berry
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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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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Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.
Wendell Berry
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We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground, and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife? As a conservative, I do abhor it.
Wendell Berry
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It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.
Wendell Berry
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In losing stewardship we lose fellowship we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.
Wendell Berry
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We are now, measurably, reducing the availability of these life-supporting goods which we can think of (though only on the conditions of good health and good care) as self-renewing or sustainable. We are also destroying rapidly the supplies of the fossil fuels, which are limited and not renewable, and on which we have become totally dependent.
Wendell Berry
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You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.
Wendell Berry
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Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Wendell Berry
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But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it.
Wendell Berry
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Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life stay away from screens.
Wendell Berry
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Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.
Wendell Berry
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
Wendell Berry
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They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.
Wendell Berry
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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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Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.
Wendell Berry
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We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.
Wendell Berry