Identity Quote by Joshua Wolf Shenk

“Today, many people not only take the self for granted but struggle mightily to connect it to anything larger. In Lincoln’s time, the idea of the self had the power—tinged with uncertainty, even with danger—of something emerging and ascending.” quote by Joshua Wolf Shenk — Download Open image

““Today, many people not only take the self for granted but struggle mightily to connect it to anything larger. In Lincoln’s time, the idea of the self had the power—tinged with uncertainty, even with danger—of something emerging and ascending.””

Joshua Wolf Shenk

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Identity

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“The Perspectives of Psychiatry, Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney identify four approaches to a suffering person.”

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“The individuals in great dyads will be very different from each other and very much alike. These simultaneous extremes generate the deep rapport and…

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“In the fourth century, John Cassian described a condition among his fellow monks that he called “acedia”: a “weariness or distress of heart . . . akin to dejection” that took “possession” of unhappy souls and left them lazy, sluggish, restless, and solitary. Later, acedia became widely translated as sloth, one of the seven deadly sins, and blended with melancholy in the…

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“creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the healthy world will deepen and widen. “These fears are at least fifty percent of what it is to be melancholy,” says Lauren Slater, a clinical psychologist who has written about her struggles with mental illness. “If…

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“The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of…

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“A person with a melancholy temperament had been fated with both an awful burden and what Byron called “a fearful gift.” The burden was…

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“because of them, he worked all the harder in his thirties and forties to “make himself,” emotionally as well as materially, and go on to do the special work he longed for. Perseverance and forbearance became core aspects of Lincoln’s character, and he would one day give the same advice his law partner Stephen Logan gave him, that what matters…

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“The distinction is essential. Fault implies a failure or weakness for which a person should be held to account, if not outright blamed. Misfortune…

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“In the early nineteenth century, a new culture—a new idea about what to hope for—emerged for many Americans, centered around the independent self, under…

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“ONE OF THE REASONS that depression is so problematic—and deadly, leading to many of the forty thousand suicides in the United States each year—is…

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“Lincoln was raised in the thick of Old School Calvinism. In Kentucky and Indiana, his parents belonged to a fire-breathing sect called Separate Baptism, in which congregants heard—in the tradition of Jonathan Edward’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—that they were bound for eternal hellfire, and nothing they could do or say or think would change…

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“As late as 1820, families made three quarters of all goods—food, clothing, tools—for their own use.”

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Explore all 30 Joshua Wolf Shenk quotes

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I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone…

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“In the worldly life, due to maadakta (intoxication of the ego of ‘I am Chandubhai’), one has completely lost awareness of everything about one’s self. Everything in the worldly life is nothing but intoxication. The food is intoxicating, the senses are intoxicating. [Therefore] Go to the one, who is without mada (pride), the one who has destroyed all intoxication. There…

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