Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward… — Wendell Berry
Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.
Poetry can be written only because it has been written.
