Obviously, we can work on a gigantic scale, but just as obviously we cannot foresee the gigantic catastrophes to which gigantic works are vulnerable, any more than we can foresee the natural and human consequences of such work. We can develop a global economy, but only on the conditions that it will not be loving in its effects on its human and natural sources, and that it will risk global economic collapse.

Wendell Berry, “Two Minds” in Citizenship Papers, 104-5.

The threat to domestic tranquility is not that people take sides and disagree, but that the sides of a political division will assume the purity and passion of moral absolutism or moral allegory, in which the people on each side think of themselves as Good and of the people on the other side as Evil. The passions on both sides then are reduced to mere anger, fear, and hatred. A society with an absurdly attenuated sense of sin starts talking then of civil war or holy war, and trending toward the psychology of the battlefield. So absolute a division forbids actual thought or discourse about moral issues, as it forbids self-knowledge, humor, and forgiveness. It may be that such division is prepared by our convention of two political parties. It may be that actual thought about a problem requires more than two opinions.

Wendell Berry, The Need to be Whole, 188-9.

Of all the things that move and breathe on earth, earth nurtures nothing frailer than a man. As long as gods bestow prosperity and he can move about with agile knees, he thinks the future holds no misery; but when, against his will, the blessed gods allot his share of griefs, he yields to these with patient heart. And so indeed it shifts– the mind of man on earth: it changes with the changes in the days sent by the father of men and gods (tr. Mandelbaum) …

οὐδὲν ἀκιδνότερον γαῖα τρέφει ἀνθρώποιο, πάντων ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει. οὐ μὲν γάρ ποτέ φησι κακὸν πείσεσθαι ὀπίσσω, ὄφρ’ ἀρετὴν παρέχωσι θεοὶ καὶ γούνατ’ ὀρώρῃ· ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ καὶ λυγρὰ θεοὶ μάκαρες τελέσωσι, 18.135καὶ τὰ φέρει ἀεκαζόμενος τετληότι θυμῷ· τοῖος γὰρ νόος ἐστὶν ἐπιχθονίων ἀνθρώπων οἷον ἐπ’ ἦμαρ ἄγησι πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε.

Homer Odyssey 18.130-137

The chief cause of the wondrous is the irrational.

τὸ ἄλογον, δι’ ὃ συμβαίνει μάλιστα τὸ θαυμαστό

Aristotle Poetics 1460a12

When a man desires ardently to know the truth, his first effort will be to imagine what that truth can be. He cannot prosecute his pursuit long without finding that imagination unbridled is sure to carry him off the track. Yet nevertheless, it remains true that there is, after all, nothing but imagination that can ever supply him an inkling of the truth. He can stare stupidly at phenomena; but in the absence of imagination they will not connect themselves together in any rational way. Just as for Peter Bell a cowslip was nothing but a cowslip, so for thousands of men a falling apple was nothing but a falling apple; and to compare it to the moon would by them be deemed fanciful.

Charles S. Peirce, Essays in Philosophy of Science. “The Scientific Imagination” §

Among the many definitions of Communism, perhaps one would be the most apt: enemy of orchards.

Miłosz, Czesław. To Begin Where I Am. 2001. p. 24

Boys have teachers, men have poets.

τοῖς μὲν γὰρ παιδαρίοισιν / ἔστι διδάσκαλος ὅστις φράζει, τοῖσιν δ’ ἡβῶσι ποιηταί.

Aristophanes. Ranae 1054-5.

Ideology-that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

Solzhenitsyn (Trans. Whitney). The Gulag Archipelago. Harper & Row.

They say man only needs six feet of earth. But it is a corpse, and not man, which needs these six feet. And now people are actually saying that is it a good sign for our intellectuals to yearn for the land and try to obtain country-dwellings. And yet these estates are nothing but those same six feet of earth. To escape from the town, from the struggle, from the noise of life, to escape and hide one’s head on a country-estate, is not life, but egoism, idleness, it is a sort of renunciation, but renunciation without faith. It is not six feet of earth, not a country-estate, that man needs, but the whole globe, the whole of nature, room to display his qualities and the individual characteristics of his free soul.

Apparently those who are happy can only enjoy themselves because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and but for this silence happiness would be impossible. It is a kind of universal hypnosis. There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him – sickness, poverty, loss – and nobody will see it, just as he now neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others. But there is no man with a hammer, the happy may goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly, like the wine in an aspen-tree, and all is well.

“Pavel Konstantininch,” he said in imploring accents. “Don’t you fall into apathy, don’t you let your conscience be lulled to sleep! While you are still young, strong, active, do not be weary of well-doing. There is no such thing as happiness, nor ought there to be, but if there is any sense or purpose in life, this sense and purpose are to be found not in our own happiness, but in something greater and more rational. Do good!”

Selections from Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov, tr. Ivy Litvinov

An hour later, going back to my hotel, I ran into a peasant woman with a nursing baby. She was a young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. And the baby smiled at her, as far as she’d noticed, for the first time since it was born. I saw her suddenly cross herself very, very piously. ‘What is it, young woman?’ I say. (I was asking questions all the time then.) . ‘It’s just that a mother rejoices,’ she says, ‘when she notices her baby’s first smile, the same as God rejoices each time he looks down from heaven and sees a sinner standing before him and praying with all his heart.’ The woman said that to me, in almost those words, and it was a deep, such a subtle and truly religious thought, a thought that all at once expressed the whole essence of Christianity, that is, the whole idea of God as our own father, and that God rejoices over man as a father over his own child – the main thought of Christ! A simple peasant woman!

Dostoevsky, The Idiot tr. Pevear & Volokhonsky, 2001.