Quotes: Choosing - and being allowed to choose - your own direction

Men on individuality

When I was in high school and college in the late '90s and early '00s, I wrote down these passages to ponder.

"He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. ... Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."
John Stuart Mill, "Liberty and Individuality," from On Liberty (1859)

"[Living in the eternal moment] means, rather, making one's decisions in freedom and responsibility, in self-awareness and in accord with one's own unique character as a person."
Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself (1953), p 272

"The degree of our freedom and self-determination varies with the level which we realize to be our self — the source from which we act."
Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman (1958), p 135

Women say

Later, I noticed these:

"Leading transies is like trying to herd cats."
Cathy Platine www.gallae.com
Note: I found this c. 1998. As seen in 2023, the website says: "Established in 1998 with public rituals held at the Serpent Mound in south central Ohio we moved to New York in 2002 with the purchase of an ageing Silver age Catskill resort inn. We incorporated in 2005 with the formal dedication of the Phrygianum property and transfer of the deed to the corporation."

"Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you're wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore."
Lady Gaga, quoted in the Gulfport, Miss., Sun Herald, quoted in The Week, Dec. 21, 2012, p. 15.

It's not only about what you choose to do, but what you're allowed to do

Thing is, you can choose your own direction, but there are also social consequences to doing so. These consequences fall unequally on different sorts of people. And some people are punished no matter what they choose. In 2023, I think about things like this (April 23, 2023 tweet):

Quotes on developing a self

"Selfhood — an obsolete idea, according to Bateson and other proponents of the ‘new consciousness’ — is precisely the inescapable awareness of man’s contradictory place in the natural order of things. … The distinguishing characteristic of selfhood, however, is not rationality but the critical awareness of man’s divided nature. Selfhood expresses itself in the form of a guilty conscience, the painful awareness of the gulf between human aspirations and human limitation. “Bad conscience is inseparable from freedom,” Jacques Ellul reminds us. “There is no freedom without an accompanying critical attitude to the self..."
Christopher Lasch. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1984. p. 257-258.

"Similar in concept to theologian James Fowler’s stages of faith (even Campbell’s hero’s journey), [M. Scott] Peck’s framework [in his book The Different Drum] consists of four systematic or hierarchical stages of spiritual growth and development. These include: the chaotic anti-social individual, the formal institutional individual, the skeptic individual, and the mystic-communal individual. Each of these stages addresses recognition, awareness, and fulfillment of our relationship to the divine."
Brian Luke Seaward. Stand Like Mountain, Flow Like Water: Reflections on Stress and Human Spirituality. (1997) Deerfield Beach, Fla.: Health Communications, Inc. 2007. p. 70.

"Anyone's drama can be examined...on this spectrum from aggressive to passive…So the order of dramas goes this way: intimidator, interrogator, aloof, and poor me."
James Redfield. The Celestine Prophecy. p. 129.

“o to be so fluid you can hold
another’s shape
& stay the same thing”
“New God of an Antique War,” sam sax, bury it, 2018

Suppose we have our first birth, our natural birth; and our "second birth," the acquisition of a Cartesian soul, as we become thinking beings; then, our "third birth" is joining society. Then, to continue with Bernard-Henri Lévy's musing on this "third birth":

"With all due respect to the “Rousseauism” of those who have never truly read Jean-Jacques Rousseau, man has never existed entirely on his own, with no attachment to a community of others.
But here, we must be very careful. To idolize the social sphere, to passively accept the constraints that result from the imposition of social laws and norms, can prove fatal for human striving. Here lies the bleak realm of Martin Heidegger’s “we.” Here are the nameless, faceless mobs prophesied by Edgar Allan Poe and who today have been unleashed on social media.
To be human is to preserve, inside oneself, against all forms of social pressure, a place of intimacy and secrecy into which the greater whole cannot set foot. When this sanctuary collapses, machines, zombies and sleepwalkers are sure to follow.
This private power may not be accessible to us at first. We aren’t born human; we become it. Humanity is not a form of being; it is a destiny. It is not a steady state, delivered once and for all, but a process.
* * *
The history of this past century teaches us that when we place our bets on nostalgia — when we dedicate ourselves to the search for some lost native land, for something pure — we only pave the way for totalitarianism. We trigger the machines to clean, purge and wash us away.
“We Are Not Born Human.” Bernard-Henri Lévy. New York Times. 22 August 2018. Translated from the French by Emily Hamilton.

The first principle of this [Confucian] ethics concerns motivation. Actions are to be done because they are proper and right, not because they are personally beneficial. Hence the essential antithesis between yi (righteousness) and li (profit). ‘The superior man understands righteousness, the inferior man understands profit.’
The second principle concerns the content of action. It is the principle of humanity (jen). Asked to define it, Confucius replied, ‘It is to love men’ and ‘Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you.’ The great Neo-Confucian Chu His puts the two principles together and teaches, ’Jen is uncalculating and has nothing in view.’
In short, proper action is useless self-transcendence. It is useless because it is not done with an eye to its results. And it is self-transcendent because it focuses on the welfare of the other rather than on my own. Sacrifices should be maintained as an act of filial obedience. But like all human action, ritual should consist of acts of yi and jen rather than li.
* * *
The first eight chapters presented the possibility of the religious life generically in terms of its three dimensions, the awesome terror of the sacred as ontological and axiological tremendum, the attractiveness of relation to the sacred as a means for dealing with guilt and death, and the attractiveness of relation to the sacred as an end in itself, as a form of useless self-transcendence.
Merold Westphal. God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. (1984) Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987. p. 154, 251.

"Many of us now alive are in the unique position of having been so both before and after the revolution of the internet. We’re a lost group — to me, anyway, even now none of my technological habits seem inevitable. There’s still a sense that this vast binge of novelty will stop and we’ll arrive at some levelheaded equilibrium between then and now. That’s no doubt delusional. Still...something startling and comforting: that in each of us is reposed something too deep to name or alter, and which for that very reason has survived, for now, the glittering surfaces of our age. A self, I suppose."
“What Tweets and Emojis Did to the Novel.” Charles Finch. New York Times. Nov. 19, 2019.

"Normal, healthy people are full of self, a kind of substance like a soul or personhood that, if you have it, emanates warmly from inside of you toward the outside of you. No one knows what it is, but everyone agrees that narcissists do not have it. Disturbingly, however, they are often better than anyone else at seeming to have it. Because what they have inside is empty space, they have had to make a study of the selves of others in order to invent something that looks and sounds like one. Narcissists are imitators par excellence.
* * *
And they do not copy the small, boring parts of selves. They take what they think are the biggest, most impressive parts of other selves, and devise a hologram of self that seems superpowered. Let’s call it 'selfiness,' this simulacrum of a superpowered self.
* * *
Because for the narcissist, this appreciation of you is entirely contingent on the idea that you will help him to maintain his selfiness. If you do not, or if you are near him when someone or something does not, then God help you.
* * *
It isn’t that the [alleged] narcissist is just not a good person; she’s like a caricature of what we mean by “not a good person.” She’s not just bad; she’s a living, breathing lesson in what badness is. Take Immanuel Kant’s elegant formulation of how to do the right thing: act in ways that could be generalized to universal principles."
Kristin Dombek. The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism. FSG Originals, 2016.

"We think of ourselves one way, but how much of ourselves do we not see? What does it say when one of us is so rigid he breaks? How close are we all to the same? How important is it, that unbendable sense of self? Of right? Where is the line between being walked on and being adaptable? How bad are we right now? And if we are wrong about so many things here, what else? What else are we clinging to, desperately, that will, after our tortured demises, prove to be incorrect?"
A. E. Osworth. We Are Watching Eliza Bright. Grand Central Publishing, 2022.

Quotes on seeking oneself

”We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochrondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”
Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014.

“Half her work is tricking him into trusting himself and the other half is giving him the tools to make the right decisions. She doesn’t know it yet, but she will find that these are the first steps toward being an adult.”
Lindsey Drager. The Archive of Alternate Endings. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Dzanc, 2019.

"Denied the Sought-After,
He longed to deserve
To be the Sought-After."
Dag Hammarskjöld. Markings [Vägmärken], (1963) Translated by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden, 1964. Ballantine Books/Epiphany, 1987. p. 158.

“You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

"...by the time you read this I will have already accepted myself, as well as the existence of alternate dimensions."
“Greenhorn.” K. Tait Jarboe. Printed in The Collection, ed. by Tom. Léger and Riley MacLeod. New York: Topside Press, 2012. p. 129.

“In African knowledge systems, a mask often represents an ideal. Masks used by the women’s Sande society, for example, represent ideals of female beauty for the Mende. As the African worldview rarely distinguishes between aesthetic and inner beauty, masks also represent spiritual paragons.
African masks, like all art, are driven by emotion, but here the art is not the African mask itself but rather the masked performance. Displaying an African mask at a museum is akin to exhibiting Leonardo da Vinci’s paintbrush at the Louvre. The product itself is missing. It is when a dancer impersonates the message of the mask that the art is produced.
I mention this because although the mask is typically perceived as a symbol of concealment and insecurity, I urge you to think of a mask differently—as an opportunity for reinvention, awakening, and the shedding of the old. The mask reflects one of the important truths about freedom—there is no fixed, authentic self. Who you are today is not who you must be tomorrow.”
Minna Salami. Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach For Everyone. Amistad, 2020. Chapter 2. “Of Liberation.”

"I began to realize that all my life I’ve been leaving myself breadcrumbs. It didn’t matter that I didn’t always know what I was walking toward. It was worthwhile, I told myself, just trying to see clearly, even if it took me years to understand what I was trying to see."
Jia Tolentino. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. New York: Random House, 2019. Introduction, p. 5.

"The world is as it is, and I am as I am, and how will I ever change either one?"
Chris Adrian. The Children's Hospital. San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2006. p. 337

“Is there change through any form of compulsion? Can there ever be change through legislation, through any form of fear?”
J. Krishnamurti. Think on These Things. ed. by D. Rajagopal. New York: Perennial, 1964. p. 178.

"If you are a breathing human being, you are resistant to change. Like all your fellow human beings, you are designed to be incapable of starting with a blank sheet of paper."
Tracy Goss, author, The Last Word on Power., quoted by Robert Hargrove. Masterful Coaching (Third Edition). Jossey-Bass, 2008. p. 49.

“Most learning consists of extended plateau periods in which we solidify progress through repetitive activity, followed by little spurts of improvement.”
Paraphrasing the thought of George Leonard, author of Mastery. Ronald S. Miller and the editors of the New Age Journal. As Above, So Below: Paths to Spiritual Renewal in Daily Life. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992. p. 35.

Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people—including yourself. One minute you’ll pray that the transformation stops, and the next minute you’ll pray that it never ends. You’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time.”
Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

Quotes on finding one's 'self' within community

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It may be claimed that we are singularities...

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"And it isn't a culture of individualism, but its lack, that makes for social tension. George Packer wrote of this in his book The Assassins' Gate about Iraq, where people's group identities overwhelmed their identities as individuals, with bloody results. In contrast, it is where people have a strong sense of themselves as individuals, rather than as subordinated to some larger social amalgam, that they can have a deep and genuine respect for other human beings, their individual worth, and their rights.
* * *
Those who believe human evil has to be controlled by a powerful state may not have noticed that the worst evils ever perpetrated have been the projects of powerful governments--from the Inquisition to the Holocaust to the Gulag. This is why we need to hold the state in check, curbing the power of a few to work their will upon the many."
Frank S. Robinson. The Case for Rational Optimism. New Brunswick, N.J. and London: Transaction Publishers, 2009. p. 126, 138.

”We talk about couples as if there were such a reality. (The reality is that two single people choose to be together in certain ways.) Couples frequently say "we" a lot because that word somehow helps push away the reality of each person's individuality. ... It cannot be proven, for example, that the color you see when you look at the sky is the same color I see. We have merely agreed that whatever color each of us sees when we look at the sky will be called blue, and that works out fairly well. Accepting our singleness is the crucial first step toward understanding ourselves.”
Art Greer. The Sacred Cows are Dying: Exploding the Myths We Try to Live By. New York: Hawthorne Books, Inc., 1978. p. 27.

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But we find our full meaning in community...

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”Our identity is a pale shadow without the people in our lives. According to the Zulu saying, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu: ‘A person is a person because of other people.’”
Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek. Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives. Jossey-Bass, 2008.

“You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.”
Newspaper columnist Leo Aikman, quoted in Bookreporter.com. Quoted in The Week, April 25, 2014. p. 17.

Cities both celebrate and erase difference. Cities are inclusive. They transcend the individual. And in so doing, they make all those strangers part of ourselves, of our own identity, our own self-category. And so we give blood, or open our homes, or race to get the wounded to the hospital. We aren’t being selfless. We are merely extending the concept of self in a way that the city makes natural. In moments of tragedy, we refuse both isolation and chaos. Instead, we put our identity as city dwellers — in this case, as Bostonians — first, and draw strength from a shared sense of self that we may not even have guessed existed."
“We are all Bostonians now.” Maria Konnikova. Boston Globe. April 21, 2013.

“...intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there.”
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, quoted in Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

“The internet is governed by incentives that make it impossible to be a full person while interacting with it. In the future, we will inevitably be cheapened. Less and less of us will be left, not just as individuals but also as community members, as a collective of people facing various catastrophes. Distraction is a ‘life-and-death matter,’ Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing. ‘A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.’”
“The I in the Internet,” Jia Tolentino. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. New York: Random House, 2019. pp. 37-38.

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One risk, though, is that the self becomes performative...

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”By the mid-seventeenth century, something strange had happened: the ideal of ‘courtesy’ had taken hold of the European imagination and the role of the nobleman changed forever. Radiating from the glittery hub of Louis XIV’s court in Versailles, European courtly life spawned a maze of mannerisms and rules of social etiquette which had to be strictly observed if one was to remain socially agile, to distinguish oneself, and to display clear markers of cultivation and wealth. These new rules extended to how and when one spoke, the kinds of things one revealed or kept hidden, the right turns of phrase, movements, and gestures, and ultimately the proper presentation of the elegantly adorned self to others — the birth of the performative self.”
R. Jay Magill, Jr. Sincerity: How a moral ideal born five hundred years ago inspired religious wars, modern art, hipster chic, and the curious notion that we all have something to say (no matter how dull). New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012. p. 65.

“How can you rediscover yourself in the face of the abyss of your identity?”https://t.co/A2UeUy7Ke2

— The Baffler (@thebafflermag) March 26, 2023

Quotes on the benefits of quiet, solitary reflection to connect with oneself

"What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do during our leisure hours determines what we are."
Philanthropist George Eastman, quoted in the Buffalo Law Journal, quoted in The Week, June 14, 2013, p. 19.

"When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you."
Leonard Cohen, quoted in the Montreal Gazette, quoted in The Week, Dec. 21, 2012, p. 15.

"What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we can communicate!"
Virginia Woolf. The Voyage Out (1915).

"Silence is the cornerstone of character."
Ohhiyesa, Santee Sioux. Quoted in Sharon Franquemont. You Already Know What to Do: 10 Invitations to the Intuitive Life. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. p. 117.

”Like most deadly attractive people, he had a hollow at the center of him. What people loved most about her husband was how mellifluous their own voices sounded when they echoed back.”
Lauren Groff. Fates and Furies. New York: Riverhead, 2015.

”And why does the nightmare described by the Internet, of encountering people who look and sound real but are fake, remind you so much of the feeling of reading the Internet itself?”
Kristin Dombek. The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism. FSG Originals, 2016.

"Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times."
Joan Baez, quoted in the Toronto Star, quoted in The Week, May 18, 2012, p. 19.

With that epiphany [that someone might hurt me because they don't understand me] comes the shock of realizing that there is an inside and an outside, and the artist is outside. Not by will. By blood. By a force beyond understanding, no more mutable than the fact that one breathes. A shock. The knowledge that one is alone in the world. Alone in mind, in mission if not in flesh. All alone, neither able to answer to any boss besides oneself nor willing. Forever alone, a thrill and an awesome responsibility. And life from then on is a party of one.”
Anneli Rufus. Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto. Da Capo Press, 2003. p. 119.

"There are a variety of ways to descend into desolation. Some people drift hither and thither slowly like autumn leaves, only half aware that they are lifeless and at the beck and call of the winds. Others plummet like frostbitten apples, bruising their flesh against every passing branch and knocking themselves senseless as they hit the ground. Others again are like chestnuts for whom a fall is a revelation. At the moment of impact the spiked shell breaks open and ejects a new shimmering kidney brown self."
Nina FitzPatrick. Daimons. Boston: Justin, Charles & Co, 2003. pp. 44-45.

"Remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world."
Poet Ocean Vuong, quoted in Mashable.com, quoted in The Week, Jan. 13, 2017, p. 17.

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out until sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."
John Muir, quoted in Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance: The Passion for Life. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. p. 24.

"I set the skull down on the table and lean back to look at it. The skull is enveloped in a profound silence that seems nothingness itself. The silence does not reside on the surface, but is held like smoke within. It is unfathomable, eternal, a disembodied vision cast upon a point in the void.

There is a sadness about it, an inherent pathos. I have no words for it.

— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Quotes on selfishness

”Psychology has distinctions only between good and bad forms of selfishness, like Rousseau's deliciously candid distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre, untranslatable into English because we would have to use self-love for both terms.”
Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. p. 178.

The puzzle in this seeming contradiction is easy to solve. Selfishness is rooted in this very lack of fondness for oneself. The person who is not fond of himself, who does not approve of himself, is in constant anxiety concerning his own self. He has not the inner security which can exist only on the basis of genuine fondness and affirmation. He must be concerned about himself, greedy to get everything for himself, since basically he lacks security and satisfaction.
Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon, 1941. pp. 136-137.

“The ego and soul are two wheels of the same bike, each necessary, both important. Without soul, the ego would be completely misdirected. The soul without ego would be endangered.”
Brian Luke Seaward. Stand Like Mountain, Flow Like Water: Reflections on Stress and Human Spirituality. (1997) Deerfield Beach, Fla.: Health Communications, Inc. 2007. p. 93.

“Iris Murdoch writes that to respond to the world justly, you first have to perceive it clearly, and this requires a kind of ‘unselfing.’ … ‘[V]irtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.’”
Matthew B. Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. pp. 99-100.

'Zusya, why were you not Zusya?' (quotes)

“Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol used to say, ‘If they ask me in the next world, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I will know the answer. But if they ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’ I will have nothing to say.”
Martin Buber. Quoted by Ronald S. Miller and the editors of the New Age Journal. As Above, So Below: Paths to Spiritual Renewal in Daily Life. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992. p. 28.

"All my gifts and gaps and efforts coalesce and coagulate — to use alchemical language — into the unique individual I am. Nicholas of Cusa wrote to a man named Giuliano, 'All things Giulianize in you.'"
Thomas Moore. Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. (1992) New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. p. 261.

“My best answer to the question ‘Are you Sam Keen?’ is ‘Not yet.’”
Sam Keen. In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred. New York: Harmony Books, 2010. p. 118.

"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."
Anna Quindlen, quoted in Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

"I have realized she is never coming out; she doesn’t exist. I am her and have always been her wearing the wrong clothes and living the wrong life. I have been wearing the right clothes for five years; it’s time to start living the life I should have always been living. It's time to transition into me."
"Still Living His Life While Wearing Different Clothes." Jas Martinez, Medium, Dec. 27, 2021.

"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
William Faulkner, quoted in the AP, quoted in The Week, May 27, 2011, p. 19.

“Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.”
Gloria Steinem, quoted in Elle.com. The Week, April 11, 2014. p. 15.

"Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world. If you do so, you are insulting yourself."
Bill Gates, quoted in United Press International, quoted in The Week, Feb. 5, 2016. p. 19.

"I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do."
Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

“But we must not lose our focus on envy as such. As we have just seen, it is a special form of preoccupation with self, but it is anything but solipsistic or narcissistic. It is essentially and intensely comparative. This is what distinguishes it from greed. Greed is directed toward that which I wish to possess. Envy is directed toward the one who possesses what I wish to possess. We acknowledge this without noticing when we say, not I envy her good looks, but I envy her her good looks. Where simple greed is at issue, I can be satisfied merely by coming to possess. But if it is a case of envy my possession must be at your expense.”
Merold Westphal. God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. (1984) Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987. p. 67.

“To be yourself is very difficult, because you think that what you are is ignoble, and that if you could only change what you are into something noble it would be marvelous; but that never happens. Whereas, if you look at what you actually are and understand it, then in that very understanding there is a transformation. … Envy arises because I want to change myself and become like somebody else. But if I say, 'Whatever I am, that I want to understand,' then envy is gone…"
J. Krishnamurti. Think on These Things. ed. by D. Rajagopal. New York: Perennial, 1964. pp. 20, 130.

”It wasn’t a particular habit or virtue, Lax decided, that made you you. It was something more like a color that seemed to be yours — something simple, indelible, given, and true.”
Michael N. McGregor. Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. Fordham University Press, 2015.

"rock our bodies back-and-forth, back-and-forth, side-to-side, side-to-side. as if to ask will we always have to answer these calls to transform?" — Destiny Hemphill, the poem "like an orb. like a planet." in motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life

"It is easy for a writer not to look like everyone else. It is hard for him to resemble himself." — V.F. in Escrever (To Write) (quoted here)

Quotes on the 'midlife crisis' and the sense of self

“This is the essence of the story of Pinocchio, I take it, who is a puppet and a person at the same time. Or, better: he is a puppet who does not know that he is already a person.”
Will Eaves. Murmur. Bellevue (2019).

“What is this ill spirit in you all of a sudden? I said I have been to the Darklands. It’s a place of bad enchantments. You stop being yourself. You won’t even know what that self is.”
“Self is what men tell themselves they are. I am just a cat.”
Marlon James. Black Leopard, Red Wolf. New York: Riverhead, 2019. Chapter 9.

“The experience of this kind of confusion — confusion around not just career, but identity itself — feels anything but frivolous. It is paralyzing.
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It’s subtle, but we can translate What do you want to be when you grow up? to You are allowed one identity in this life, so which is it? How terrifying is that? When phrased that way, it’s no wonder the question stresses us out.”
Emilie Wapnick. How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up. New York: HarperCollins, 2017. pp. 5, 7.

"The very notion of 'identity' is a bad philosophical project that has held sovereign sway over how we've understood what is possible for us. There is an obsession with how to pin down, how to get at the fundamental element... Identity as an apparatus of legibilizing, of interpellating, requires that those for whom the identity is definitional only be inasmuch as they measure up to the identity and, most crucially, do not permit themselves to be other than the identity which commits an atrocious monopolozing of how one can emerge as a subject. ...identity is invoked as an immutable possession... Identity, put bluntly, is a project of promoting subjective purity for the sake of being corralled into machinic grease for the systems in place that wish only for their own perpetuation."
So I promote aboltion of one of the vectors of identity: gender.
Marquis Bey. Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022. p. 133-134.

“Sometimes, you have to step outside the person you believe yourself to be. And remember the person you were meant to be. The person you wanted to be.”
H. G. Wells, quoted in the Salem, Mass., News., quoted in the Week, June 13, 2014. p. 15.

"It is common today to locate one’s “true self” in one’s leisure choices. Accordingly, good work is taken to be work that maximizes one’s means for pursuing these other activities, where life becomes meaningful. The mortgage broker works hard all year, then he goes and climbs Mount Everest. The exaggerated psychic content of his summer vacation sustains him through the fall, winter, and spring. The Sherpas seem to understand their role in this drama as they discreetly facilitate his need for an unencumbered, solo confrontation with unyielding Reality. There is a disconnect between his work life and his leisure life; in the one he accumulates money and in the other he accumulates psychic nourishment. Each part depends on and enables the other, but does so in the manner of a transaction between sub-selves, rather than as the intelligibly linked parts of a coherent life."
Matthew B. Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. p. 181.

"People may call what happens at midlife 'a crisis,' but it’s not. It’s an unraveling — a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you’re “supposed” to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are."
Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

“If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves.”
Pablo Neruda. Quoted in Sharon Franquemont. You Already Know What to Do: 10 Invitations to the Intuitive Life. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. p. 108.

“We make art, in other words — and appreciate art — knowing that the art and artist will disappear. This is difficult to accept when your book first comes out, but it is why you keep writing (you tell yourself). We keep changing our sense of who we are. We hold it together knowing that we will also fall apart.”
“Holding It Together, Falling Apart: On Living Through Grief, Both Collective and Personal.” Matthew Salesses. LitHub. Sept. 8, 2020.

"It’s only when the structure of a society gets torn down that you find out what you are really made of. Primo Levi and Dostoyevsky understood this, because they saw it happen. When we lead lives of opulence and safety, we have only illusions of who we are."
Chris Hedges, speaking in “Moral Combat: Chris Hedges on. War, Faith, and Fundamentalism.” Bethany Saltman, interviewing Chris Hedges, The Sun, December 2008, p. 7.

Writing your 'postage stamp of reality'

Mary Karr said we have to write about what we really are and what we have to write about, not what we'd like to write about:

“It’s difficult to accept what your psyche or history dooms you to write, what Faulkner would call your postage stamp of reality. Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are.”

Norman Mailer said that we write about ourselves and about others:

"We write novels out of two cardinal impulses (other than to make a living and the desire to be famous). One is to understand ourselves better, and the other is to present what we know about others. Of course, it is often impossible to comprehend anyone else until one has plumbed the bottom of certain preoccupations about oneself. That is why the writer is always at risk of using his or her talent for therapy – which can be closer to creative inanition than to art."

Jacob Needleman said that we write about our tensions and contradictions:

"The teacher makes room for the pupil to exist consciously in between the two natures of man. Similarly, the great sacred literature and art of the world, at its level, creates palaces and worlds of room for the individual person, the spectator in his flesh and blood moment of now, to become aware of the mysterious co-presence of two opposing forces in the world and in himself. Sacred art, like sacred life, is the mysterious blending of these two elements of cosmic reality, a blending that cannot be conceptualized or analyzed by the ordinary mind. It is the 'navel' in all sacred stories and myths and above all, in all sacred action of spiritually developed men and women."

Sources

Norman Mailer. The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House, 2004. pp. 126-127.

Jacob Needleman. Why Can't We Be Good? New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007. p. 231.

Loving others and the need to be loved in return

Krishnamurti said: "If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something – and it is only such love that can know freedom."

Yet is this realistic? People have needs. Eric Felten:

"The point of love is not simply to possess the objects of our affections, but to be loved in return. We give love in no small part to get love, and it's not a very satisfying deal to give love and, in return, get a painfully honest appraisal of just what one's love was really worth. As novelist Leonard Michaels put it, 'Adultery has less to do with romance and sex than with the discovery of how little we mean to each other.' Or, to recast his observation in a positive way, it is through fidelity that we demonstrate how much someone matters to us."

For the monogamously inclined, to love one person in a romantic or sexual way is to feel exclusively that way about that person. Eric Rohmer:

"If there's one thing I dislike about the Church, it's the whole custom of accounting, which happily is disappearing. So many good marks measured against so many bad ones. Good deeds versus sins. What really matters is your attitude in general. The way you feel that dictates your actions. For instance, when you love one girl, you don't feel like sleeping with another..."

When people are loved, they know it, says Julie Bogart:

"Love comes as inevitably as death. It is the death of selfishness and the resurrection of hope. It doesn't just soothe or appease. It conquers. It gets all the way down inside of us and opens a door. It offers a ride; it ignites a flame. Love does it all. Not love in the abstract, but love that each person recognizes and experiences. You know when you've been loved. You don't have to write sermons about it, you don't have to convince yourself of love. Love conquers – it takes back territory that was unloved and marks it."

Sources

J. Krishnamurti. Think on These Things. ed. by D. Rajagopal. New York: Perennial, 1964. p. 28.

Eric Felten. Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. p. 141. Quoting Leonard Michaels, Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999. p. 124.

"My Night at Maud's." Eric Rohmer. Six Moral Tales. New York: Viking, 2006. (Originally published in French under Six contes moraux in 1974. Viking English translation 1980.) p. 94.

"The Coming of Love." Julie Bogart. Printed in Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. Edited by Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2003. p. 114.

Connecting to others while maintaining a sense of self

Rainer Maria Rilke: "Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky."

Alan Watts: "Profound love reveals what other people really are: beings in relation, not in isolation." One such relation is union. Erich Fromm: "Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self." This self-integrity is essential. Maria Lugones: "Love is seen not as fusion and erasure of difference but as incompatible with them [fusion and erasure of difference]." Connection leads to love, and love indicates this connection. James Redfield: "I consider love a barometer for my own connection." This is the thing that must be done: Fritz Buri: "The task of theology is not to prove that God is love but to show that love constitutes the fulfillment of human existence."

This can be found and it can be lived: given and received.

Charlie Morris:

"It is important to know though, primarily, that unconditional love isn’t rare. It is just that it is, as of yet, something that humans are rarely able to experience and share with one another. Unconditional love is the basis of all reality. Existence is love itself. But when you can’t experience this first hand, and something in you aches for it...and you are still not sure what it is that you are searching for...you will find yourself in the 'depression'. And thank God for that. Thank God for the knowing that something isn’t quite right with the world. Without the depression, you would never try to climb out and into a new way of living. And if you never fall into the depression, you are either on the side of not knowing you cannot love...or trying really hard to receive love from people who are not capable of offering it."

Catullus: "sis in amore potens" (may you be capable of love).

Sources

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters," quoted by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, p 255.

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, p 199.

Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955. Quoted in Ray Billington. Religion Without God. Routledge: New York, 2002. p 106.

Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, 'World-Travelling,' and Loving Perception," Hypatia 2, no 2 (Summer 1987):3. Quoted in "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism," by Karen J. Warren, in Ecological Feminist Philosophies edited by Karen J. Warren. Indiana University Press, 1996.

James Redfield, quoted in "The Evolution Revolution." Interview by Anne A. Simpkinson. Copyright (c) 2002 Beliefnet, Inc.

Fritz Buri. How Can We Still Speak Responsibly of God? Translated by Chary D. Hardwick. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968. p 40.

"'Depression'—Revised." Charlie Morris. Feb. 10, 2012. Accessed Feb. 11, 2012.

Catullus, Poem C

Begin where you are, evolve into yourself

Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek:

"Leadership expert Warren Bennis has said that ‘letting the self emerge is the essential task of leaders.’ He cites a study of the advice that top executives would give to younger ones, in which three recommendations surfaced: first, take advantage of every opportunity; second, aggressively search for meaning; and third, know yourself. Authors Bill George and Peter Sims call it finding your ‘true north’ – ‘the internal compass that guides you successfully through life. It represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level. It is your orienting point.’"

Uzma Aslam Khan:

"I mean, he died the way he needed to, without saying who he was, because he is Zahoor. He is becoming. If you leave behind definable tracks, people first point to them, then own you, then put you in a box. That leaves your poor spirit with an impossible burden. But a soul not bent with the weight of mortals wanders freely. We will remember your grandfather in an infinite number of ways."

J. Krishnamurti:

"We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition."

Diana Butler Bass:

“Contemporary thinkers have noted the change – and the new role that storytelling plays in our lives. Sociologist Anthony Giddons claims that our identity is found "in the on-going story about the self" and further asserts that "each of us not only 'has' but lives a biography." Moral philosopher Charles Taylor says that we understand life as an "unfolding story" in which "we grasp our lives as narrative." Put simply, we become ourselves as we tell our stories. We cannot know ourselves apart from our stories – stories in which we are both author and actor.”

Brian Klaas:

“it’s important to understand that within the logic of these media universes—be it in Russia or with Fox in the United States—that you can’t defeat a “nothing is true and everything is possible” worldview with better facts.

As Pomerantsev told me: “The big mistake people make is to think: ‘What if we just give them the facts?’ It’s got nothing to do with that,” Pomerantsev says. “You’ve got to understand what you’re dealing with. They’re giving people a sense of identity, giving people meaning and giving people a way to interpret the world.”

There is a generational battle over reality in the United States. That is the political showdown that will determine the political future of the country—and whether democracy survives. For the foreseeable future, the nexus of Trumpworld and Fox News will remain the most powerful weapon that aids the forces of “unreality.””

Sources

Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek. Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives. Jossey-Bass, 2008.

Uzma Aslam Khan. The Geometry of God. Clockroot Books, 2009. Kindle Location 3155

J. Krishnamurti. Think on These Things. ed. by D. Rajagopal. New York: Perennial, 1964. pp. 12-13.

Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 138.

Brian Klaas. How Fox "News" Mimics Russian Propaganda Tactics. The Garden of Forking Paths. May 14, 2024.

Is there a true self?

Martin Laird wrote:

"There is a lot of talk in contemporary theology and philosophy about what a "self" is. One wonders how much of it Paul would have been able to follow, or care about for that matter. But he does have something evocative to contribute: your life, your "self," who you truly are, is something that is "hidden in Christ in God." Whatever there is about human identity that can be objectively known, measured, predicted, observed, whether by the Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the tax man, or the omniscient squint of your most insightful aunt, there is a foundational core of what we might as well call identity that remains hidden from scrutiny's grip and somehow utterly caught up in God, 'in whom we live and move and have our being,' in whom our very self is immersed."

Uzma Aslam Khan wrote in the novel The Geometry of God:

"That is the ultimate goal of his devotion: to revert to his original self. It's a belief in pre-existence. Or extinction. You could say the Sufi is the original evolutionist."

Or is there no "foundational core," no "original self"? Shunryu Suzuki wrote:

"What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale."

Sources

Martin Laird, O.S.A. Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. pp. 13-14.

Uzma Aslam Khan. The Geometry of God. Clockroot Books, 2009. Location 77.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Quoted in Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989. p. 19. (This is a revised version of Telling Your Story, originally published 1973.)

Also

'No Cuisine In The World Can Be Called Authentic.' Here's Why.: Food Network champion Maneet Chauhan will make you think twice next time you criticize a culture's cuisine. Sucheta Rawal, HuffPost, May 15, 2024