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What Are People For?: Essays QUOTES

What Are People For?: Essays QUOTES

1 " Much protest is naïve; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

2 " Eating is an agricultural act. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

3 " More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement. More and more, our farms and forests resemble our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons—why else should we be so eager to escape them? We recognize defeated landscapes by the absence of pleasure from them. We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them.

Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

4 " The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

5 " Another decent possibility my critics implicitly deny is that of work as a gift…They assume—and this is the orthodox assumption of the industrial economy—that the only help worth giving is not given at all, but sold. Love, friendship, neighbourliness, compassion, duty—what are they? "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

6 " Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

7 " Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

8 " He speaks always in reference to a real world, thoroughly experienced and understood. His words keep an almost physical hold on 'what I have touched with my hands and what have touched me...' Surely this is the power that we have periodically sensed in what is called (vulgarly) 'the vulgar tongue. It is a language under the discipline of experience, not of ideas or rules. Shaw's words, always interposed between experience and intelligence, have the exactitude of conviction, whereas the words of an analyst or theorist can have only the exactitude of definition. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

9 " I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

10 " Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

11 " True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible… In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

12 " No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to "spiritual" subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

13 " One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

14 " The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

15 " How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry—between, say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is “accepted” as a “trade-off. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

16 " To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

17 " A good community, in other words, is a good local economy. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

18 " And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.   In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.   In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

19 " And by it we enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. Only discord can come of the attempt to share solitude. 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. One returns from solitude laden with the gifts of circumstance. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays

20 " it is pride that lies awake in the night with its desire and its grief. "

― Wendell Berry , What Are People For?: Essays