Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
Interpretation
Self-knowledge reveals uncomfortable truths about ourselves that cannot be ignored.
Michael Sandel's quote highlights the complexity of self-knowledge, suggesting that while it can be disconcerting or challenging, the understanding we gain about ourselves is an irreversible process. Just as lost innocence cannot be regained, once we have acquired self-knowledge, we can no longer return to a state of ignorance, leading to a deeper awareness of our identities and choices.
In practice
In a personal development workshop, one might use this quote to discuss the importance of confronting one's true self.
First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.
If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.
I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.
The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.
This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.
I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.
One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.
What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
God does not delay to hear our prayers because He has no mind to give; but that, by enlarging our desires, He may give us the more largely.
Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an idea in somebody's head. The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad is another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which represent ideas. An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that did not exist before.
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