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Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over 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
Security
Future
Power
Obsession
Granted
Measure
Hold

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Be joyful because it is humanly possible.
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I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.
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THE WILD ROSE” – BY WENDELL BERRY Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart. Suddenly you flare again in my sight A wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was only shade And I am blessed and choose again, That which I chose before.
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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.
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Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
Wendell Berry
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If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.
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I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
Wendell Berry
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A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.
Wendell Berry
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In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.
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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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As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.
Wendell Berry
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We need to confront honestly the issue of scale... You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.
Wendell Berry
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Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.
Wendell Berry
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The old and honorable idea of 'vocation' is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.
Wendell Berry
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There is a religious principle: Love thy neighbour as thyself. But it's also an economic asset. If you've got a neighbour, you've got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbours, you can't have a limitless growth economy. You have to prefer to have a neighbour rather than to own your neighbour farm.
Wendell Berry
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You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough
Wendell Berry
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We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody's enemy.
Wendell Berry
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The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, ...but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else.
Wendell Berry