life on planet earth on Imitation

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though ...

My father was an artist. He had a black leather sketchbook filled with cartoons and doodles. As a boy I was enthralled by his drawings and wondered how I could learn to draw like him. I began by traci...

Syndrome (formerly called Incrediboy) in the film The lncredibles is one example of envy’s futility and the envier’s inferiority, which together secure the inevitable lack of success in besting one’s ...

Yes, we mark our heads with ashes—public shows of piety are not in themselves evil. But we must guard our motivations and do most of our spiritual work in private, because the privacy of those acts re...

O God, the Father of the forsaken, the help of the weak, the supplier of the needy, you have distributed and proportioned your gifts to body and soul, in such sort that all may acknowledge and perform...

The eight laws of learning are explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition.

The neighborhood bar is possible the best counterfeit there is to the fellowship Christ wants to give his church. It’s an imitation, dispensing liquor instead of grace, escape rather than reality, but...

We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes fro...

Someone might say of a son, ‘He’s a chip off the old block; he’s the spitting image of his father.’ That is not to say he is identical, but he does bear the family likeness. You can see his father in ...

Have you ever been told that you’re like someone else, someone you admire and respect, someone you’d love to be like? I had that experience many times while growing up. My family and I were members of...

I don’t compare myself to Jesus, but there are spooky similarities.

What people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or restoration.

In their book Friend and Foe, social psychologists Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer cite a study by Emory University scientist Frans de Waal regarding comparison. De Waal trained capuchin monkeys ...

And so, like runaway slaves, we either flee our own reality or manufacture a false self which is mostly admirable, mildly prepossessing, and superficially happy. We hide what we know or feel ourselves...

[The flattery of others] is narcotic and addictive. It preys on two desperate and inescapable desires; to be thought well of by others and to think well of ourselves … We desire and need approbation s...

Blessed is he who has learned to admire but not envy, to follow but not imitate, to praise but not flatter, and to lead but not manipulate.

Repetition is a form of change

We are molding Jesus into our image. He's beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is who we are most comfortable with. The danger now is when we gather in our church buildings to ...

[Addiction is a] counterfeit of religious presence.

And so, like runaway slaves, we either flee our own reality or manufacture a false self which is mostly admirable, mildly prepossessing, and superficially happy. We hide what we know or feel ourselves...

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Repetitio mater studiorum est. (Repetition is the mother of learning.)

In life, whenever someone achieves success, criticism usually follows—regardless of their skill or the effort they’ve invested. An old story illustrates this truth. A woman crafted artificial fruit so...

When I can, I do my best to keep up the farce of who I pretend to be. [while suffering from severe depression]

We are masters at creating an image, but we are novices at recognizing and repenting of the image we have created.

Perhaps the greatest irony in the life of continual comparison is that while it involves so much attention to the attributes and gifts of other people, it’s actually quite self-focused. From that hype...

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

Keep practicing until it lives inside you; then it will seem foolishly easy to the unpracticed.