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Give your approval to all you cannot understand.

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
Giving
Approval
Understand
Cannot
Give

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Analogies have tied things together for me, personally. The fundamental one for me is the analogy between your relationship to your spouse and your relationship to your place. Both need to be a settled commitment and both involve continuous learning and adjusting.
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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The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.
Wendell Berry
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But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.
Wendell Berry
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At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment-everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing.
Wendell Berry
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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
Wendell Berry
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The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.
Wendell Berry
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And if we ask what are the cultural resources that can inform and sustain a proper creaturely and stewardly awareness of the lives in a farmer's keeping, I believe that we will find them gathered under the heading of husbandry.
Wendell Berry
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Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.
Wendell Berry
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The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves.
Wendell Berry
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This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part the free world seems to be regarding it as merely normal.
Wendell Berry
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We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.
Wendell Berry
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We are living even now among punishments and ruins.
Wendell Berry
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There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.
Wendell Berry
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It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don't love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.
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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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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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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You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.
Wendell Berry
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Having hope is hard harder when you get older.
Wendell Berry