Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
Interpretation
This quote conveys the idea that our self-identity is constructed and to change it, we must invent a new identity from our current self, which raises questions about the nature of selfhood.
Robert Penn Warren's quote explores the complex relationship between our self-identity and the processes required for personal transformation. It suggests that while we are bound by the definitions we've constructed for ourselves, changing our identity necessitates a re-examination of our essence and core values. The paradox lies in the notion that to create a new self, we must utilize the self that exists, raising profound questions about the nature of identity and self-evolution.
In practice
This quote can be used in a personal development seminar to inspire participants to rethink their self-identity.
...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
So little time we live in Time,_x000D_ _x000D_ And we learn all so painfully,_x000D_ _x000D_ That we may spare this hour's term_x000D_ _x000D_ To practice for Eternity.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
History is at once freedom and necessity.
The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.
Remember that you have only one soul; that you have only one death to die; that you have only one life. . . . If you do this, there will be many things about which you care nothing.
I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.
I don't like the word 'strong,' because a strong character is never an interesting character. A character is made interesting by their vulnerabilities and their weaknesses.
Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
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