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We cannot comprehend what comprehends 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
Comprehends
Comprehension
Comprehend
Cannot

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed
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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Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
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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Action can only be understood in relation to place only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.
Wendell Berry
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When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.
Wendell Berry
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Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
Wendell Berry
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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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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 law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.
Wendell Berry
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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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If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.
Wendell Berry
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The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.
Wendell Berry
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Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.
Wendell Berry
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When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.
Wendell Berry
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And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
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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There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.
Wendell Berry
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Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call the economy or the free market is less and less distinguishable from warfare.
Wendell Berry
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When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.
Wendell Berry