We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn’t make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn’t live without them.
WENDELL BERRYIf I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far:
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…
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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
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I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
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