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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
Approval
Understand
Cannot
Give
Giving

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.
Wendell Berry
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People talk about job creation, as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
Wendell Berry
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If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
Wendell Berry
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Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.
Wendell Berry
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Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.
Wendell Berry
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What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.
Wendell Berry
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The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, ...but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else.
Wendell Berry
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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
Wendell Berry
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If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
Wendell Berry
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In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.
Wendell Berry
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Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.
Wendell Berry
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I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.
Wendell Berry
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This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.
Wendell Berry
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It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'
Wendell Berry
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The world is whole beyond human knowing.
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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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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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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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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We can fight the global economy with a strong local economy.
Wendell Berry