Quote

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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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Life
Takes
Withhold
Dies
Longevity
Death
Beware
Doe
Machinery
Back
Forest
Giving
Forests
Thing
Decent
Men
Gives

More quotes by 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.
Wendell Berry
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To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.
Wendell Berry
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The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflied that fly up in flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.
Wendell Berry
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We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.
Wendell Berry
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Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.
Wendell Berry
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When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.
Wendell Berry
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Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.
Wendell Berry
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You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.
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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It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.
Wendell Berry
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
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We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody's enemy.
Wendell Berry
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We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.
Wendell Berry
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People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
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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The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
Wendell Berry
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The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that to work is to pray. (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)
Wendell Berry
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Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
Wendell Berry
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We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.
Wendell Berry
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The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.
Wendell Berry