Quote

The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert... a man with a machine and inadequate culture... is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

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
Machines
Shakes
Road
Excess
Whose
Locals
Foreigner
Hold
Local
Pestilence
Less
Damage
Foreigners
Culture
Machine
Settled
Better
Desert
Inadequate
Men
Leads
Stays

More quotes by 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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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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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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The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.
Wendell Berry
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Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.
Wendell Berry
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THE WILD ROSE” – BY WENDELL BERRY Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart. Suddenly you flare again in my sight A wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was only shade And I am blessed and choose again, That which I chose before.
Wendell Berry
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Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
Wendell Berry
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The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.
Wendell Berry
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There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.
Wendell Berry
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Why I am NOT going to buy a computer
Wendell Berry
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A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.
Wendell Berry
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Having hope is hard harder when you get older.
Wendell Berry
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The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.
Wendell Berry
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They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.
Wendell Berry
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We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.
Wendell Berry
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The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
Wendell Berry
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Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
Wendell Berry
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I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
Wendell Berry
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Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.
Wendell Berry
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As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no intellectual property, and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.
Wendell Berry