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Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don’t buy anything new.

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
Absolutely
Unless
Anything

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
Wendell Berry
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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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A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.
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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I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
Wendell Berry
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The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts.
Wendell Berry
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If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
Wendell Berry
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If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.
Wendell Berry
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A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written.
Wendell Berry
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...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.
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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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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We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?
Wendell Berry
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You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
Wendell Berry
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Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
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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There are some things the arrogant mind does not see it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.
Wendell Berry
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...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.
Wendell Berry
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You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.
Wendell Berry
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We clasp the hands of those who go before us.
Wendell Berry