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 BERRYMy belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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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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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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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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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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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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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.
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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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Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
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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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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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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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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.
WENDELL BERRY