It is only in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth; it is only to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are… Separate from the relationships, there is nobody to be known.
Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Individuality, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The problem, of course, is that we are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which … [ Read more ]
Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Individuality, Life & Society, Meaning, Psychology | Behavior
What a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge … [ Read more ]
Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement
I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household. Those are the poles between which a competent morality would balance and mediate: the doorstep and the planet. The most meaningful dependence of my house is not on the U.S. government, but on the world, the earth. No matter how sophisticated and complex and powerful our institutions, we are still exactly … [ Read more ]
Author: Wendell Berry | Subjects: Environment | Sustainability, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
The disease of modern character is specialization. The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself.
Author: Wendell Berry | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement