The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
Every single experience, every single thing that's happened in my life, struggle, obstacle, trials and tribulations, I think they've all molded me to become the character and the person who I am.
Character isn't something you were born with and can't change, like your fingerprints. It's something you weren't born with and must take responsibility for forming.
We are shaped by our conversations.
Talent is nurtured in solitude; character is formed in the stormy billows of the world. [Ger., Es bildet ein talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.]
Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself.
I think people make their own faces, as they grow.
The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life.....Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are.
Education is soul crafting.
At birth, the child leaves a person - his mother's womb - and this makes him independent of her bodily functions. The baby is next endowed with an urge, or need, to face the out world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with 'the psychology of world conquest.' By absorbing what he finds about him, he forms his own personality.
One does what one is; one becomes what one does.
Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.
History does influence our lives - every moment. We never sort of live our lives in a linear fashion. We always have these memories and these images from our past that sometimes we're not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.
Destiny is not a strange power which determines what shall happen to me. It is myself as given, formed by nature, history, and myself. My destiny is the basis of my freedom; my freedom participates in shaping my destiny.
Don't ask who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit. And it's constantly being shaped and tugged at: by what you hear and watch and say and read and think and experience.
What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.
I do love my hometown. It really forged who I am in a major way.
We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again
The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.
I was raised the right way, my parents did a great job, I owe them everything. Without them, I'm not the man I am today.
A tree forms itself in answer to its place and the light. Explain it how you will, the only thing explainable will be your explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV
I've had a very specific path over the years. Sometimes they're not all we want them to be, but they create who we are.
I think the '80s created me, in a way, when I look back on that time, but I don't necessarily think that a lot of my choices, and a lot of things that I did, and a lot of things that happened to me - or I let happen to me - were about that decade.
