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We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.

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
Miracle
Mystery
Alive
Within

More quotes by 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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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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We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Wendell Berry
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Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
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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The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
Wendell Berry
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The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
Wendell Berry
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You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction
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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Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.
Wendell Berry
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People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities.
Wendell Berry
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Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
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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Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Wendell Berry
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What I stand for is what I stand on.
Wendell Berry
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The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.
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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You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.
Wendell Berry
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It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
Wendell Berry