A Quote by Andy Stanley
Our culture highlights all the trouble, all the drama, all the affairs and all the junk. Do not believe for a minute that any of that reflects reality. That does not have to be your future. The handwriting is not written on the wall.
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First, believe in your ability to create the future. That's what leaders do-that is our job. Understand reality but never be imprisoned by it. Reality is a moment in time. The future has not yet been written-it is written by leaders.
I think culture's always been violent, and it is something we find very entertaining. Not only does it reflect our social reality, but it also reflects our psychic reality.
I teach you that there is no other aim than to live with such totality that each moment becomes a celebration. The very idea of "aim" brings future into the mind, because any aim, any end, any goal, needs future. All your goals deprive you of your present, which is the only reality you have. The future is only your imagination, and the past is just footprints left in the sands of your memory. Neither is the past real anymore, nor is the future real yet. This moment is the only reality.
There is no such thing as beauty. If your culture says, 'This is a beautiful girl,' that's within the framework of your culture. If you're brought up in an island where people have pointed heads, that would be 'beautiful' in your terms. All these mythological structures is what gets us into trouble; the artificiality of our values that get us into trouble.
Going to any place that you view as more politically oppressed than your own country, there's a weird tendency to assume that the whole existence is determined minute by minute by the political reality, but of course, that's not the case for any of us.
As a nation we have the right to decide our own affairs, to mould our own future. This does not pose any danger to anybody. Our nation is fully aware of the responsibility for its own fate in the complicated situation of the contemporary world.
Actually 'bad' doesn't do justice to my handwriting. Neither does 'handwriting.' 'Desecration of paper' about covers it.
What does interest me is how difficult my culture seems to find it to look the dark side of life directly in the eye. It seems to me that if we look back at mediaeval culture, for example, we see a society which faces the reality of death and pain and limitation, because it has to. Our society, which is progressive and technological and seems to have a slightly fanatical utopian edge to it, gets very uncomfortable when anybody highlights the dark side of humanity, or the world we have built, or what we are doing to the rest of life on Earth.
Our culture is in deep trouble, and at the heart of its trouble is its loss of a vision for manhood. If its difficult for you and me as adult males to maintain our masculine balance in this gender-neutral culture, imagine what it must be like for our sons, who are growing up in an increasingly feminized world.
You'll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I've written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has in a sense shaped me.
Junk food, junk religion, and junk products just leads to excessive numbers of junk people living junk lifestyles.
We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.
I started buying bits of broken porcelain. I furnished our first flat with pieces of 'junk.' Some of that 'junk' is now worth an awful lot of money. What I was calling 'junk' in the '60s people wouldn't call 'junk' now.
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Our laws are a reflection of our culture. Our culture does not condone the torture of innocent and defenseless creatures. And we as a society believe all God's creatures should be treated humanely.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive... To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
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