Religion is what binds us back to the source of life.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: The Use of Energy p.279
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A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: The Idea of a Local Economy p.255
In war, even the winner is a loser.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Economy and Pleasure p. 213
We know from childhood that winning is fun. But we probably begin to grow up when we begin to sympathize with the loser.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Economy and Pleasure p. 213
Community, however, aspires toward stability. It strives to balance change with constancy. That is why community life places such high value on neighborly love, marital fidelity, local loyalty, the integrity and continuity of family life, respect for the old, and instruction of the young. And a vital community draws its life, so far as is possible, from local sources. It prefers to solve its problems, for example, by nonmonetary exchanges of help, not buying things. A community cannot survive under the rule of competition.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Economy and Pleasure p. 212
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
To know nothing is no more possible than to know enough.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | People, Land, and Community p.183
[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
These ways of marriage, kinship, friendship, and neighborhood surround us with forbiddings; they are forms of bondage, and involved in our humanity is always the wish to escape … But involved in our humanity also is the warning that we can escape only into loneliness and meaninglessness.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | Men and Women in Search of Common Ground p.141
More and more it has seemed to me that the idea of an individual, the idea that there is someone to be known, separate from the relationships, is simply an error.
– Mary Catherine Bateson quoted by Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | Men and Women in Search of Common Ground p.138
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