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.
Wendell BerryRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the difference between hope and expectation, highlighting the potential pitfalls of having expectations.
Wendell Berry's quote reflects on the delicate balance between hope and expectation, suggesting that while it can be comforting to have expectations, they also carry risks of disappointment. He acknowledges that expectations can be tempting and even necessary, yet they can lead to fear and uncertainty, particularly when experiences remind us that outcomes are often unpredictable. The essence of the quote urges individuals to nurture hope while remaining cautious about allowing those hopes to transform into rigid expectations that may lead to emotional distress.
Themes
HopeExpectationFearDisappointmentExperience
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about resilience and managing expectations.
More from Wendell Berry
All quotes βA corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
Wendell BerryRead
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.
Wendell BerryRead
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.
Wendell BerryRead
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.
Wendell BerryRead
I finally knew... why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed the prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed his divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal.
Wendell BerryRead
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When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.
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When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.
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