The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
WENDELL BERRYTo 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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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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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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A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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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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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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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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To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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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.
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The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
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The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
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If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
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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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