Quote

I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.

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
Identity
Promise
Issues
Firsts
First
Includes
Done
Promises
Think
Hopes
Thinking
Mostly

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.
Wendell Berry
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Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Wendell Berry
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The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
Wendell Berry
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Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.
Wendell Berry
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
Wendell Berry
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The promoters of the global economy...see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.
Wendell Berry
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To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.
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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Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.
Wendell Berry
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Love changes, and in change is true.
Wendell Berry
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Invest in the millenium.
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 hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.
Wendell Berry
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The industrial mind is a mind without compunction it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986)
Wendell Berry
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Our Children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience, or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water come from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.
Wendell Berry
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I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children...
Wendell Berry
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Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
Wendell Berry
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The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.
Wendell Berry
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We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods.
Wendell Berry
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There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.
Wendell Berry