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
The past is our definition. We may strive with good...
The past is our definition. We may strive with good...
The past is our definition. We may strive with good...
The past is our definition. We may strive with good...
About This Quote

This quote is a reminder that our past determines who we are and how we view the world. It does not make a good person, it makes a good person from a bad past. You can look at the bad parts of your past as a negative but they are only that if you choose to see them as such. Instead, you can look at those parts as an opportunity to define yourself as a better person.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. - William Shakespeare

  2. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times. - Paulo Coelho

  3. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. - Aristotle

  4. The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them. - Paulo Coelho

  5. By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. - Confucius

More Quotes By Wendell Berry
  1. Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.

  2. What I stand for is what I stand on.

  3. 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...

  4. Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure...

  5. I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed...

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