Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?
Interpretation
Imagination, coupled with knowledge and love, is essential for compassion and understanding the impact of one's actions.
Wendell Berry's quote highlights the importance of imagination in our ability to empathize with others and recognize the gravity of our actions. He suggests that those in power, lacking in imagination and compassion, are able to commit atrocities without understanding or feeling the pain they inflict, raising profound questions about the coexistence of power and empathy.
In practice
This quote is perfect to discuss the role of leaders in ethical decision-making during a seminar.
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.
There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.
The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creators hand.
After the horse dance was over, it seemed that I was above the ground and did not touch it when I walked.
Was it Aristotle who said the human soul is composed of reason, will, and desire?” “No, that was Plato. Aristotle and Plato were as different as Mel Tormé and Bing Crosby. In any case, things were a lot simpler in the old days,” Komatsu said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to imagine reason, will, and desire engaged in a fierce debate around a table?
Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.
We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
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