Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
WENDELL BERRYPrayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we ‘know’ that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
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This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.
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If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
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Whether we or our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
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These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
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To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
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Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
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I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
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And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.
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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.
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The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
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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.
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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
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And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.
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Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it.
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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
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The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
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