So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of selfless love and acts that defy conventional logic.
Wendell Berry's quote encourages individuals to engage in acts of love and kindness that may not make practical sense in a materialistic world. It calls for a commitment to ideals such as love for a higher power and humanity, advocating for actions that encompass generosity, self-sacrifice, and hope for a greater societal good, even when these actions seem futile or illogical.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a motivational speech about community service to inspire others to act selflessly.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
I have not conceived my mission to be that of a knight-errant wandering everywhere to deliver people from difficult situations. My humble occupation has been to show people how they can solve their own difficulties.
Nothing will stifle your human evolution more than fame and fortune.
The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are blindly adopted; the second wilfully preferred.
Big-picture thinkers broaden their outlook by striving to learn from every experience. They don't rest on their successes, they learn from them.
Humans are ridiculous. We're all pathetic strivers who will fall short. If you can accept that, it's optimistic because you can shoot for the moon and know you're never going to get there, and that's OK.
I think you have to be yourself, and you have to be real and you have to admit what you don't know, and talk about what you do know, and talk about what you don't know as long as you say you don't know it.
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