Because we are a conglomerate of our experiences - you take away any experience and you take away a piece of identity. You take away a piece of identity and we don't really know who we are.
Take away material prosperity; take away emotional highs; take away miracles and healing; take away fellowship with other believers; take away church; take away all opportunity for service; take away assurance of salvation; take away the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit... Yes! Take it all, all, far, far away. And what is left? Tragically, for many believers there would be nothing left. For does our faith really go that deep? Or do we, in the final analysis, have a cross-less Christianity?
Take away someone’s fear, or low intelligence, or dishonesty . . . and you take away their compassion. Take away someone’s aggression and you take away their motivation, or their ability to assert themselves. Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation.
I believe life experiences are what an actor needs to relate to the character roles they take on, and to say the least, I've had many experiences leading up to this moment. Not only have my experiences become a tremendous asset in my acting, but also they helped me discover who I am and who I want to be.
The coaches that I've had, my teammates that I've met throughout this journey, it's something that you can't take away. It almost feels like a degree. You can't take that away from somebody.
Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.
The one thing that you can't ever take away are the relationships, the experiences that you have, particularly at the high school level.
So when we wake from the ignorance of this world, the dream of existence, all of the experiences that we have ever had fall away. The ideas of life and death, of rebirth, of reincarnation, karma, God, truth, knowledge - all these things fall away.
'The Haters' has some of the generalities of band experiences that I've had - the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality - but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.
Oh Beloved, take me. Liberate my soul. Fill me with your love and release me from the two worlds. If I set my heart on anything but you let fire burn me from inside. Oh Beloved, take away what I want. Take away what I do. Take away what I need. Take away everything that takes me from you.
It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day.
I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.
In the ten years since I had run away from home...I had gone through more strange experiences than the average person crowds into a whole lifetime.
I talk to our kids now that they are grown up, and I ask them about the experiences that had growing up that really had a powerful influence on the way they view the purpose of life. The experiences that really shaped their values - my wife and I have no memory of those experiences!
It's so much more fun to do the work than to talk about it. I will have to admit that. Everybody gets to decide how they feel, and what to take away by themselves, and that's what you hope for. That people will take away different things and have different experiences from the work we do as actors. So I don't like to prescribe how to feel about the work I do.
Every single time I step into a ring, the same thing is on the line. Take away belts, take away money, take away glamour and fame. Ultimately, I'm fighting for one thing, and that's my life.