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
Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!
We have international standards regulating everything from t-shirts to toys to tomatoes. There are international regulations for furniture. That means there are common standards for the global trade in armchairs but not the global trade in arms.
I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything...
Taxation is not a method by which the community corporately provides itself with essential services, but a fund to be divided between different interests with political claims upon the state.
Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.
At one time through love all things come together into one, at another time through strife s hatred, they are borne each of them apart.
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