Culture breeds and fosters the individual in his uniqueness and yet the individual feels cramped through participating in his culture. Strange, how culture itself brings in us the consciousness of being dissatisfied with it.
··· Tags pointing to: identity ···
An injured lion still wants to know he can still roar.
Well-makers lead the water wherever they like; fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves.
God’s love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God’s love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves. How could we love ourselves without this motive? It is impossible for man to love himself except in this roundabout way.
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him, not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.
Either you control your attitude or it controls you.
The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know as ourselves.
We are all too ready to believe that the self that we have created out of our more or less inauthentic efforts to be real in the eyes of others is a “real self.” We even take it for our identity. Fidelity to such a nonidentity is of course infidelity to our real person, which is hidden in mystery. Who will you find that has enough faith and self-respect to attend to this mystery and to begin by accepting himself as unknown?
The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.
I finally decided to be myself; it’s so much simpler that way.
The things that we love tell us what we are.