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.
WENDELL BERRYAnnual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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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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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
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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.
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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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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.
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We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.
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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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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.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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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.
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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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The two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.
WENDELL BERRY






