Frances Lee Menlove - On Institutional and Individual Honesty

It is impossible for the Church to face the great problems and threats of our age without individual members being free to express to themselves and to others what they think and believe. With the almost unlimited possibility for new scientific discoveries, new sociological and anthropological insights, new ways of explaining human behavior, modern man cannot escape perplexity. "What the Church needs today, as always, are not adulators to extol the status quo, but men whose humility and obedience are no less than their passion for truth; men who brave every misunderstanding and attack as they bear witness; men who, in a word, love the Church more than ease and the unruffled course of their personal destiny." The members of the Church are responsible for the Church.

 -Frances Lee Menlove, "The Challenge of Honesty" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1966), pg.53

The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus, or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid."...He is at once set apart and isolated,a s he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization--absolute and unconditional--of its own particular law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being...he has failed to realize his life's meaning.

Carl Jung, Collected Works (Chapter 7)

Quoted by Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 33)

"It was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be not other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 326)

"An artist who deceives himself is a fraud and a whore. You [cut off your payos] because you were ashamed. You did that because wearing payos did not fit your idea as an artist. Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist. It is of no importance to me whether you wear your payos behind your ears or whether you cut off your hair entirely and go around bald...Great artists will not give a damn about your payos; they will only give a damn about your art...You want to cutt off your payos, go ahead. But do not do it because you think it will make you more acceptable as an artist."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 257)