Habits of the Heart Quotes

“What people need to accept is that it is there responsibility to communicate what they need and what they feel, and to realize that they cannot expect someone else magically to make them happy. People want to be made happy, instead of making themselves happy”
― Richard Madsen, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“If other people don't meet your needs, you have to be willing to walk out, since in the end that may well be the only one way to protect your interests.”
― Richard Madsen, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“Love, then, creates a dilemma for Americans. In some ways, love is the quintessential expression of individuality and freedom. At the same time, it offers intimacy, mutuality, and sharing. [...] The sharing and commitment in a love relationship can seem, for some, to swallow up the individual, making her (more often than him) lose sight of her own interests, opinions, and desires. Paradoxically, since love is supposed to be a spontaneous choice by free individuals, someone who has "lost" herself cannot really love, or cannot contribute to a real love relationship. Losing a sense of one's self may also lead to being exploited, or even abandoned, by the person one loves.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“Finding oneself means, among other things, finding the story or narrative in terms of which one's life make sense. [...] In most societies in world history, the meaning of one's life has derived to a large degree from one's relationship to the lives of one's parents and one's children. [...] Clearly, the meaning of one's life for most Americans is to become one's own person, almost to give birth to oneself. Much of this process, as we have seen, is negative. It involves breaking free from family, community, and inherited ideas. Our culture does not give us much guidance as to how to fill the contours of this autonomous, self-responsible self, but it does point to two important areas. One of these is work, the realm, par excellence, of utilitarian individualism. [...] The other area is the lifestyle enclave, the realm, par excellence, of expressive individualism.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“In the absence of any objectifiable criteria of right or wrong, good or evil, the self and its feelings become our only moral guide. [...] There each individual is entitled to his or her own "bit of space" and is utterly free within its boundaries. [...]. But while everyone may be entitled to his or her won private space, only those who have enough money can, in fact, afford to purchase the private property required to do their own thing. As a consequence, economic inequalities neccessarily delimit our individual "rights" to self-fulfillment - or unjustly violate those rights.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“The "unselfish love" of a wife and mother for her husband and children was seen as the most visible example of morality itself.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“In a period when work is seldom a calling and few of us find a sense of who we are in public participation as citizens, the lifestyle enclave, fragile and shallow though it often is, fulfills that function for us all.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“Romantic love is a quintessential form of expressive individualism. When it becomes not only the basis for the choice of life partner but the condition for the continuation of a marriage, it tends to make of marriage itself a lifestyle enclave.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“Most people don't want to have to tell you how they feel. They want you to divine that.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life