quotations about identity
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
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A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
COCO CHANEL
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
It is not a slight thing, gentlemen, to force a man to say what he is, or what he believes himself to be; for that supreme word of man, that single expression which he utters of and upon himself is decisive. It lays down the basis upon which all judgment of him is to be formed. From that moment all the acts of his life must correspond to the answer given by him.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
Jesus Christ: Conferences Delivered at Notre Dame in Paris
Identical strictly means "one and the same;" and if it were tied down to its strictest usage, it would indeed follow very logically, as we have said already, that no such thing as personal identity is possible.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"Personal Identity", Essays on Life, Art and Science
It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.
PHILIP K. DICK
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Identity is a relation between our cognition of a thing, not between things themselves.
SIR. W. HAMILTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Disconnect your identity from what you produce, and that's a hard thing for us because we think of our significance, worth and value based on what we do instead of who we are.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
interview, Title Trakk: Your Christian Book
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage--his name is self.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The most exciting part of finding out who we are is discovering our own uniqueness, who we are outside the box, beyond the categories in a Psychology 101 textbook. In our inimitable singularity, there is an infinite range of possibility that cannot be tied to any one description of what it means to be human or healthy.
DAVID RICHO
interview, The Urban Muse
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
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
People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.
BERTOLT BRECHT
In the Jungle of Cities
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
People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.
PHILIP K. DICK
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Discourse on Inequality
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
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Sea and the Mirror"
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
letter to Clare Westcott, November 26, 1975