QuoteProject
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
Walter Lippmann
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Our character often distorts our true selves through the ideals we create.

Walter Lippmann's quote suggests that individuals often present a constructed version of themselves, shaped by societal ideals and personal selections, rather than revealing their genuine nature. This 'wax figure' symbolizes how our character can obscure the reality of who we truly are, suggesting that our identities are influenced more by external expectations than by our authentic selves.

Themes

IdentityCharacterAuthenticitySelf-PerceptionIdealization

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a discussion about personal identity in a philosophy class.

More from Walter Lippmann

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter LippmannRead
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
Walter LippmannRead
The news and the truth are not the same thing.
Walter LippmannRead
There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
Walter LippmannRead
The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
Walter LippmannRead
The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
Walter LippmannRead

Similar quotes

Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe.
Gaston BachelardRead
Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, 'To-morrow, success or failure won't matter much; and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.'
William Makepeace ThackerayRead
Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language... It is to say, 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.'
Desmond TutuRead
I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, there a church of God exists, even if it swarms with many faults.
John CalvinRead
I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense, the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.
Pope Benedict XviRead

A little wisdom, now and then

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