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Portrait of Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry

(1934) Author United States

847 quotes in 2542 categories

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Wendell Berry is an author from the United States, best known for The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

Quick Facts About Wendell Berry

Born: August 5, 1934
Nationality: United States
Profession: Author
Notable works: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

About Wendell Berry

His early essays include The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America (1977). He also wrote the Port William novels such as A Place on Earth (1967), Jayber Crow (2000) and That Distant Land (2004).

Awards & Honors

Thomas Merton Award Poets' Prize Guggenheim Fellowship National Humanities Medal Helmerich Award Jefferson Lecture Four Freedoms Award – Freedom Medal Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Show 1 more awards

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award

Quotes by Wendell Berry · Page 14

The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small…

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That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we…

Absurd

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The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but…

Alive

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As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The…

Book

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There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for…

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“It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known…

Death

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No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to "spiritual" subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive…

Chiefs

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“For a long time then I seemed to live by the slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this…

Faith

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The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which…

Eating

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To be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be well known...The…

Abet

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I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of…

Absence

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“And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine;…

Body love

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“This economy is based upon consumption, which ultimately serves, not the ordinary consumers, but a tiny class of excessively wealthy people for…

Economics

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“Back there in the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early…

Death

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And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little…

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“Rest in peace'. That's not the way these accounts are kept. We don't rest in peace. The life of a good man…

Good man

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The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on…

Animal

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The name of our proper connection to the earth is 'good work,' for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors…

Art

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“I will purge my mind of the airy claims of church and state, and observe the ancient wisdom of tribesman and peasant,…

Ancient wisdom

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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…

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In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most…

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There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together…

Generous

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“There can be no such thing as a “global village.” No matter how much one may love the world as a whole,…

Global village

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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…

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When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the…

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The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems…

Bombing

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At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the windwaves…

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The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying…

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Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a…

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“The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability…

Ability

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The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things,…

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“we must not speak or think of the land alone or of the people alone, but always and only of both together.…

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“Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has as yet produced no effective understanding of…

Faith

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A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other…

Education

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The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as…

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To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature,…

Affection

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Returning from the wilderness a man becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors…

Blessing

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The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another…

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Today, local economies are being destroyed by the pluralistic, displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality.…

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And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak…

Being thankful

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Wendell Berry by topic

Life (105) Nature (90) World (82) Love (79) Time (71) People (66) Economy (49) Community (46) Thinking (40) Humans (40) Economics (39) Inspirational (38) Psychology (37) Religion (35) Earth (33) Food (32)