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Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.

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
Makes
Whole
Wholeness
Reverence
Ignorant
Respect
Possible
Though
Understanding

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed
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.
Wendell Berry
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Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don’t buy anything new.
Wendell Berry
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All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.
Wendell Berry
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Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.
Wendell Berry
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Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato
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 we can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present. For the amelioration of the future condition of our kind we must look, not to the wealth or the genius of the coming generations, but to the quality of the disciplines and attitudes that we are preparing now for their use.
Wendell Berry
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The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
Wendell Berry
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It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don't love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.
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
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A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.
Wendell Berry
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The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.
Wendell Berry
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So friends, every day do something that won't compute.
Wendell Berry
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You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.
Wendell Berry
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To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.
Wendell Berry
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To accept that there is nothing to do is to despair. It is to become in some fundamental way less than human. Those of us who are protesting are protesting in part for our own sake to keep ourselves whole as human beings.
Wendell Berry
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A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.
Wendell Berry
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He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
Wendell Berry
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We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.
Wendell Berry