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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
Understand
Cannot
Give
Giving
Approval

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
Wendell Berry
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We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.
Wendell Berry
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Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.
Wendell Berry
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An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
Wendell Berry
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All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.
Wendell Berry
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Geese appear high over us, / pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, / as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear / in the ancient faith: what we need / is here. 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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Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)
Wendell Berry
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Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
Wendell Berry
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What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
Wendell Berry
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The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.
Wendell Berry
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Willing to die you give up your will keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.
Wendell Berry
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The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
Wendell Berry
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If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as a matter of course. I don't know what you'd call the result - probably not capitalism or socialism.
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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It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.
Wendell Berry
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We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.
Wendell Berry
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Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.
Wendell Berry
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My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
Wendell Berry
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Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.
Wendell Berry
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It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.
Wendell Berry