Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that self-discovery is an active process rather than a passive one; we create our identities through our choices and actions.
Jacques Barzun's quote emphasizes the idea that we do not simply uncover a pre-existing self; instead, our identity is shaped and constructed through our experiences, decisions, and growth. The journey of personal development involves actively engaging with life, experiencing challenges, making choices, and learning from them, thus crafting who we are. This perspective highlights the responsibility each individual has in defining their own essence rather than waiting for a revelation.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal growth, one could use this quote to illustrate the importance of actively participating in one's own life journey.
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect
One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable.
We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed at night with nothing to eat, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways.
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.
somehow one must love the world without being worldly.
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