Wendell Berry said this quote

“ The idea that people can be improved by being offended will finally have to meet the idea (espoused some of the time by some of the same people) that books, popular songs, movies, television shows, sex videos, and so on are just fiction or just art and therefore exist for their own sake and have no influence. To argue that works of art are only fictions or self-expressions and therefore cannot cause bad behavior is to argue also that they cannot cause good behavior. It is, moreover, to make an absolute division between art and life, experience and life, mind and body - a division that is intolerable to anyone who is at all serious about being a human or a member of a community or even a citizen. ”

Famous Quotes of Wendell Berry

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Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.

~ Wendell Berry

What I stand for is what I stand on.

~ Wendell Berry

The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or accessing what we now call information - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

~ Wendell Berry

Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.(pg.95, The Body and the Earth)

~ Wendell Berry