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God too loves material things; He invented them. The Devil’s work is abstraction – not the love of material things, but the love of their quantities.

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: The Gift of Good Land p.301

Heroic works are meant to be (among other things) instructive and inspiring to ordinary people in ordinary life, and they are, grandly and deeply so. But there are two issues that they are prohibited by their nature from raising: the issue of lifelong devotion and perseverance in unheroic tasks, and the issue of good workmanship or “right livelihood.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: The Gift of Good Land p.300

The drama of ordinary or daily behavior also raises the issue of courage, but it raises at the same time the issue of skill; and, because ordinary behavior lasts so much longer than heroic action, it raises in a more complex and difficult way the issue of perseverance. It may, in some ways, be easier to be a Samson than to be a good husband or wife day after day for fifty years.

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: The Gift of Good Land p.300

The good worker will not suppose that good work can be made properly answerable in haste, urgency, or even emergency. But the good worker knows too that after it is done work requires yet more time to prove its worth. One must stay to experience and study and understand the consequences – must understand them by living with them, and then correct them, if necessary, by longer living and more work.

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | People, Land, and Community p.187

[T]he assumption is that we can first set demons at large, and then, somehow, become smart enough to control them. This is not childishness. It is not even “human weakness.” It is a kind of idiocy, but perhaps we will not cope with it and save ourselves until we regain the sense to call it evil.

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | People, Land, and Community p.183