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 BERRYIf we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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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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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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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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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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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
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Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
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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.
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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.
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
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It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.
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I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
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