In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.
Camille PagliaRead
We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.
Interpretation
What this quote means
We must acknowledge our past and traumas but ultimately take responsibility for our own actions and choices.
Camille Paglia's quote emphasizes the importance of individual responsibility in shaping our identity and life choices. While our life experiences and traumas can influence us, it is crucial to recognize that we have the power and agency to control our reactions and decisions, rather than attributing our circumstances solely to external factors or the actions of others.
Themes
ResponsibilityVictimhoodAgencyTraumaIdentity
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech to encourage personal growth and accountability.
More from Camille Paglia
All quotes →Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
Camille PagliaRead
Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
Camille PagliaRead
The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.
Camille PagliaRead
We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
Camille PagliaRead
Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.
Camille PagliaRead
Similar quotes
The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.
Arthur KoestlerRead
Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.
Madame De StaelRead
Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder.
Thomas MertonRead
We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we'll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.
Madeleine L'EngleRead
However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself.
Nick HornbyRead
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
Muriel BarberyRead