Sources of the Self Quotes

“To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.”
― Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

“Experience is that wherein our previous sense of reality is undone, refuted, and shows itself as needing to be reconstituted. It occurs precisely in those moments where the object 'talks back'.”
― Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

“The self is both made and explored with words; and the best for both are the words spoken in the dialogue with friendship. (pp 183)”
― Charles Margrave Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

“Leibniz combines Aristotelian teleology in the notion that the nature of a thing provides for its unfolding in a certain fashion with the modern idea that the nature of a thing is within it. Because the forms are internal in the way that they are not with Aristotle, the harmony of the world has to be pre-established by God.”
― Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity