May Quote by Wendell Berry

“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.” quote by Wendell Berry — Download Open image

“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 Berry

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More by Wendell Berry

During the last 17 years... I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though still visible, and this year it has provided abundant pasture, more than in any year since we have owned it. But to make it as good as it is now has taken 17 years. If I…

Wendell Berry

Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions…

Wendell Berry

To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a…

Wendell Berry

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“The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in mariage. My grandfather made…

Wendell Berry

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The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever…

Wendell Berry

“I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was…

Wendell Berry

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“The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment" -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound division between it an ourselves. We have given up the understanding -- dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought -- that we and our country create one another, depend on one…

Wendell Berry

A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define…

Wendell Berry

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“That we can prescribe the terms of our own success, that we can live outside or in ignorance of the Great Economy are the greatest errors. They condemn us to a life without a standard, wavering in inescapable bewilderment from paltry self-satisfaction to paltry self-dissatisfaction. But since we have no place to live but in the Great Economy, whether or…

Wendell Berry

“The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend.…

Wendell Berry

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The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

Wendell Berry

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The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.

Wendell Berry

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More May quotes

There is something more important than any ultimate weapon. That is the ultimate position-the position of total control over Earth that lies somewhere out in space. That is . . . the distant future, though not so distant as we may have thought. Whoever gains that ultimate position gains control, total control, over the Earth, for the purposes of tyranny…

Lyndon B. Johnson

Many individuals spend a considerable portion of their lifetimes in terror of one imagined catastrophe or another. The classic is that your immortal soul will be consigned to eternal torment in the never-ending subterranean barbecue if you fail to follow the whacky edicts of one particular set of puckered dogwhistles or another. You may recall from the great movie Strange…

L. Neil Smith

It is said that history turns on small hinges. A human career, too, results from an accumulating series of decisions about large and small…

Norman Vincent Peale

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You've touched people and known it. You've touched people and never may know it. Either way, you have something to give. It is in…

Laura Schlessinger

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For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow…

Alfred North Whitehead

So many things beat upon us in a lifetime that simply enduring may seem almost beyond us… But the test a loving God has set before us is not to see if we can endure difficulty. It is to see if we can endure it well. We pass the test by showing that we remembered Him and the commandments He…

Henry B. Eyring

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

Susan Sontag

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Then come to realize that you're making mountains out of molehills. Realize how petty you've become. Sure, it may feel like you can't get a grip on this town. It may seem that every time someone offers you a hand up, they just let go and you slip further down. But you must stop being so pessimistic, Hannah, and learn…

Jay Asher

She smiled, if he could see that, and waited for him to ask the real question. But he was silent. He wanted her to volunteer the story, she realized, and she could just as easily choose to say nothing. But he deserved to know. They all deserved it, and Kirra already knew it, and Cammon may have guessed it, because…

Sharon Shinn

A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of…

Daniel Pinchbeck