quotations about identity
Whatever you are physically ... male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy--all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. Whatever the color, the shape, the design of the shade that conceals it, the flame inside the lamp remains the same. You are that flame.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
DORIS LESSING
The Grass Is Singing
Identity is a relation between our cognition of a thing, not between things themselves.
SIR. W. HAMILTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Be careful who you pretend to be. You might forget who you are.
ANONYMOUS
We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Discourse on Inequality
What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself.
CESARE PAVESE
The Beach
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
MARCEL PROUST, The Guermantes Way
There was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
No Country for Old Men
People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.
BERTOLT BRECHT
In the Jungle of Cities
Just as our fingerprints are one-of-a-kind, so is our identity. Each of us is a once-only articulation of what humans can be. We are rare, unmatched, mysterious. This is why the quality of openness is so crucial to our self-discovery. We cannot know ourselves by who we think we are, who others take us to be, or what our driver’s license may say. We are fields of potential, some now actualized, most not yet.
DAVID RICHO
interview, The Urban Muse
What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.
CHARLES DE LINT
Happily Ever After
The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
COCO CHANEL
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
This also shows wherein the identity of the same man consists, viz. in participation of the same continued life by particles of matter successively united to the same organized body.
JOHN LOCKE
Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding
No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage--his name is self.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra