On creating ideals

More Tagore, from more reading of My Life in My Words:

It is an insult to his humanity if man fails to invoke in his mind a definite image of his own ideal self, of his ideal environment which it is his mission externally to reproduce. It is the highest privilege of man to be able to live in his own creation. His country is not his by the mere accident of birth, he must richly and intimately transform it into his own, make it a personal reality. And what is more, man is not truly himself if his personality has not been fashioned by him according to some mental picture of perfection which he has within. His piled up wealth, his puffed up power can never save him from innate insignificance if he has not been able to blend all his elements into a dynamic unity of presentation. It is for him inwardly to see himself as an idea and outwardly to show himself as a person according to that idea. The individual who is able to do this strongly and clearly is considered to be a character. He is an artist, whose medium of expression is his own psychology. Like all other artists, he often has to struggle hard with his materials to overcome obstructions, inner and outer, in order to make definite his manifestation.

I do love how Tagore makes artists of all of us in this excerpt.