Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of not only individual self-discipline but also the necessity of collective responsibility in society.
Wendell Berry's quote highlights that true fulfillment and harmony in community life demand more than personal self-restraint; it calls for a communal approach to discipline and consideration for the shared well-being of society. This communal restraint can serve as a foundation for a thriving, cooperative environment where individuals prioritize the common good over mere personal satisfaction.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about community involvement and civic duty.
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.
We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.
PRACTICE OF THE Art of Peace is an act of faith, a belief in the ultimate power of nonviolence. It is faith in the power of purification and faith in the power of life itself. It is not a type of rigid discipline or empty asceticism. It is a path that follows natural principles, principles, that must be applied to daily living. The Art of Peace should be practiced from the time you rise to greet the morning to the time you retire at night.
There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it. To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance.
Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.
An eminent reputation is as dangerous as a bad one.
Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.
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