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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Education is not intervention, but assistance toward self-reliance.
“Respect denotes the ability to see a person as [they are]; to be aware of [their] unique individuality.”
“seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.”
The past does not decide now. It is your now that decides the past.
If children do not know, teach them.
With any other power struggle, however, get off the battlefield as soon as you detect it.
In every way, violence is a low-cost, easy means of communication. But before deeming it morally unacceptable, we must say that it is a rather immature form of conduct for people to engage in.
There is no respect in communication with anger and violence.
One does not compete with anyone, and there is no winning or losing. It does not matter if there are differences in knowledge, experience, or ability between oneself and others. All people are equal, regardless of scholastic achievement or work performance, and it is in the very act of cooperating with others that building community has meaning.
Being constantly concerned about how one is judged by others, one can no longer live one’s own life.
Your place to be is there, without needing to be a special being or be outstanding in any way. Let’s accept our ordinary selves, ourselves as “everyone else.”
If you feel insulted by these words, you are probably still trying to be a “special me.” Consequently, you seek approval from others. And therefore you seek to gain admiration and draw attention, and continue to live within the framework of problem behavior.
instead of placing worth on “being different from other people,” place worth on “being yourself.”
A way of living in which, instead of being yourself, you compare yourself to others and try to accentuate only your difference, is just a way of living in which you deceive both others and yourself.
In other words, a person’s worth is not something that is decided by what kind of work they engage in. It is decided by the attitude with which they undertake that work.
Here, we must recall the words of Erich Fromm. Namely, that respect is “the ability to see a person as [they are],” and “the placing of worth on that person being that person.”
There is value in you just being “you.”
This is the separation of tasks. How that other person feels about you, and what sort of attitude they take toward you, are the other person’s tasks and are not something you have any control over.
Freud, for example, after the experience of the war, proposed the existence of the “death drive,” which would become known as “Thanatos” or “destrudo.” This is a concept that has been subjected to all manner of interpretation, but it may be best understood as the “destructive impulse with regard to life.”
If one wants to rid the world of conflict, one has to free oneself of conflict first.
We must not wait for respect from other people, but must ourselves have respect and confidence in them. … We must not become poor-spirited.
love is the building of a happiness of an inseparable “us.”
Love has neither self-interest nor other-interest—it rejects both.
Because it is through loving others that we at last become adults.
If, for example, your relationship with your parents came to an end all of a sudden, or a relationship with a student or a friend came to an end, would you be able to accept it as the “best possible parting”?
