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Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition QUOTES

Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition QUOTES

1 " It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines. "

― Wendell Berry , Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

2 " I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle. "

― Wendell Berry , Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

3 " It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced. "

― Wendell Berry , Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

4 " Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity. "

― Wendell Berry , Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

5 " To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think. "

― Wendell Berry , Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

6 " I think that the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine was correct in reminding us that life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to "figure it out" or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know, moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody's claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage, be controlled. It is, as Blake said, holy. To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, not humanity, but a few humans its predictably inept masters. "

― Wendell Berry , Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

7 " The walls of the rational, empirical world are famously porous. What come through are dreams, imaginings, inspirations, visions, revelations. There is no use in stooping over these with a magnifying lens. "

― Wendell Berry , Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition