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Exlpore more Emotion quotes
"Walking was not fast enough so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can go only as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down."
"Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity."
"I have wished a bird would fly away,And not sing by my house all day;Have clapped my hands at him from the doorWhen it seemed as if I could bear no more.The fault must partly have been in me.The bird was not to blame for his keys.And of course there must be something wrongIn waiting to silence any song."
"Those things that take my breath away become the ocean-complex and deep-and I'm prone to drowning in beautiful things. Like you."
"She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar."
Explore more quotes by Wendell Berry
"How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, and skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity.
Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came."
"A nuclear reactor is a proposed "solution" to "the energy problem." But like all big-technological "solutions," this one "solves" a single problem by causing many...A garden, on the other hand, is a solution that leads to other solutions. It is a part of the limitless pattern of good health and good sense."
"We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw."
"We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. 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."
"We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.One's inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one's most intimate sources.In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures."
"In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time."
"We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity."
"The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first."
"I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place. The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but still they liked it. What they came together for was to acknowledge, just by coming, their losses and failures and sorrows, their need for comfort, their faith always needing to be greater, their wish (in spite of all words and acts to the contrary) to love one another and to forgive and be forgiven, their need for one another's help and company and divine gifts, their hope (and experience) of love surpassing death, their gratitude."
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