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The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

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
Around
Thought
Way
Constructions
Formed
Construction
Within
Language
Experience

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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People who want to see the beauty of nature from motorboats and automobiles would obviously be just as pleased, and as fully recreated, at a drive-in movie.
Wendell Berry
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A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
Wendell Berry
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The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.
Wendell Berry
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Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.
Wendell Berry
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I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.
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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We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.
Wendell Berry
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I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.
Wendell Berry
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I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.
Wendell Berry
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Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.
Wendell Berry
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It's the impeded stream that sings
Wendell Berry
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It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Wendell Berry
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and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.
Wendell Berry
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If you grow a garden you are going to shed some sweat, and you are going to spend some time bent over you will experience some aches and pains. But it is in the willingness to accept this discomfort that we strike the most telling blow against the power plants and what they represent.
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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It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
Wendell Berry
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A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.
Wendell Berry
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I have always loved a window, especially an open one.
Wendell Berry
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Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
Wendell Berry
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So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.
Wendell Berry