QuoteProject
It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
Tom Junod
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Acknowledging past wrongs is essential for personal growth and moral understanding.

This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing and confronting one's past mistakes, particularly those that have caused harm to others. The author reflects on how the experience of being a bully not only haunts him but also shapes his moral compass, preventing him from arrogantly labeling himself as a good person without accountability for his actions. It suggests that true conscience and goodness arise from facing and understanding one's flaws.

Themes

ConscienceBullyingPersonal GrowthMoralitySelf-Reflection

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion on personal growth and accountability, one might say, 'As Tom Junod expresses, my experience as a bully shapes how I view my own conscience.'

More from Tom Junod

By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.
Tom JunodRead
Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.
Tom JunodRead
That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.
Tom JunodRead
Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.
Tom JunodRead
I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.
Tom JunodRead
The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.
Tom JunodRead

Similar quotes

The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
Thomas PaineRead
Envy assails the noblest: the winds howl around the highest peaks.
OvidRead
Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes with which Christ looks out his compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.
Teresa Of AvilaRead
Only by a frank discussion of the very details of dying can we best deal with those aspects that frighten us the most. It is by knowing the truth... that we rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita of death.
Sherwin B. NulandRead
The great home of the soul is the open road.
D. H. LawrenceRead
The Sage has no thinking mind and therefore there are no ‘others’ for him.
Ramana MaharshiRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.