IDENTITY QUOTES III

quotations about identity

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that -- how to express this -- you really must make the self. It's absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it.

MARY MCCARTHY

The Paris Review, winter-spring 1962


Even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see.

ROGER ZELAZNY

Lord of Light


You are what you are, not what others would have you be.

ANNE RICE

The Wolves of Midwinter


You cannot spend your life wanting to be someone else, snipping off pieces of yourself you don't like, and suddenly expect, upon reaching a goal, to be confident, self-accepting, rooted like an oak tree in your being.

GENEEN ROTH

Appetites: On the Search for True Nourishment


The endless story that we construct to make sense of our lives must inevitably include the author as actor, object, observer, and setting, and there is only so much coherence you can expect from a story like that.

CARL BEREITER

Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age

Tags: Carl Bereiter


Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.

ANDRE GIDE

Autumn Leaves


I don't need to worry about identity theft because no one wants to be me.

JAY LONDON

Business Law Today


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


Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.

CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

Human Nature and the Social Order


The world knows what you seem; it does not know what you are.

WALTER BAGEHOT

The English Constitution

Tags: Walter Bagehot


The buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. I'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Sexing the Cherry


Be careful who you pretend to be. You might forget who you are.

ANONYMOUS


The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

Human Nature and the Social Order


Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

MARGARET DRABBLE

A Summer Bird-Cage


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


Every fellow is really two men -- what he is and what he might be; and you're never absolutely sure which you're going to bury till he's dead.

GEORGE HORACE LORIMER

Old Gorgon Graham


When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?

MARY SHELLEY

Frankenstein


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


What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself.

CESARE PAVESE

The Beach


There was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world.

MARY OLIVER

"The Journey", Dream Work