Identity Quotes

Eric Samuel Timm

Actions speak louder than words, in fact. When we don't take action, we foster the mistaken
Actions speak louder than words, in fact. When we don't take action, we foster the mistaken reality of our old identity.

Simona Panova

Even I don’t know myself... In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real life...

Veronica Roth

I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me-they, and the love and
I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me-they, and the love and loyaty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could.

Neil Gaiman

Sleep my little baby-oh Sleep until you waken When you wake you'll see the world If
Sleep my little baby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you'll see the world
If I'm not mistaken...

Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure...

Face your life
Its pain,
Its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.

Ashly Lorenzana

The more fucked up you are, the more I like you. As long as you've managed to hold onto your identity through all the shit, then it won't matter how twisted you are. I will love you more for it.

Wendy Wasserstein

The trick. . .is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary.

Jeanette Winterson

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting
I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy force that wants nothing more than for us to honor and accept who we are and discover what we’re meant to do in the world.

Gilles Deleuze

Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.

Penelope Farmer

And, she thought uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel like, Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that?

Jonathan Friesen

The moment was surreal. A sometimes-autistic young man with two identities lecturing a room full of zombies on feelings and realities.

Simona Panova

And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself.
But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Search not for happiness outside yourself, for nothing could be further from the truth.

Slash Coleman

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his
Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

Slash Coleman

Love is the bee that carries the pollen from one heart to another.. Slash Coleman
Love is the bee that carries the pollen from one heart to another.

Slash Coleman

I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.

Sol Luckman

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond
True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia - but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.

Ashly Lorenzana

The only unique contribution you can offer the world is to be who you actually are and no one else.

Doug Cooper

There’s a drive in a lost soul - in one that is searching for acceptance, companionship, belonging, whatever you want to call it. The slightest coincidence ignites a spark that one hopes will lead to something meaningful.

Megan Abbott

The more I did it―the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high.
It was something. Don't say it wasn't.

Pushpa Rana

I invented you the way I like but I have fallen for you the way you are.

Slash Coleman

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

Wendell Berry

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

Edward Gorey

I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.

Jeremy Camp

I knew that (job) had to be a humbling role for my dad, but he never allowed it to become humiliating work.

Dawn Gluskin

You are not your thoughts!! This simple yet powerful statement can greatly change the quality of your life.

Madonna

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

Kishore Bansal

Our identity in the world is like a wave from the Ocean.

Brennan Manning

Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.

Harvey Fierstein

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself.

Gabriel García Márquez

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Steve Jobs

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. [Stanford University commencement
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice."

[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005]

Pascal Mercier

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.

Philip K. Dick

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.

Ashly Lorenzana

People leave imprints on our lives, shaping who we become in much the same way that a symbol is pressed into the page of a book to tell you who it comes from. Dogs, however, leave paw prints on our lives and our souls, which are as unique as fingerprints in every way.

Joseph Conrad

Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of inextinguishable regrets.

Ashly Lorenzana

Never try to do anything that is outside of who you are. A forced smile is a sign of what feels wrong in your heart, so recognize it when it happens. Living a lie will reduce you to one.

Tori Spelling

We are not defined by the family into which we are born, but the one we choose and create. We are not born, we become.

RuPaul

When you become the image of your own imagination, it's the most powerful thing you could ever do.

Sharon Maas

She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world.

Curtis Sittenfeld

There was a way in which my grandmother's true self was not these guests' business; no one's true self was the business of more than a very small number of family members or close friends.

E.E. Cummings

to be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its’ best, night and day, to make you just like everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Robin Wasserman

Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

...modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.

Jasleen Kaur Gumber

I will be me,
when world aberrantly
will feel, my gravity!
I will turn into my,
when their shrill cry
will stop asking why!
(Poem:Because you so wanna meet me, Book: Ginger and Honey)

Patrick Rothfuss

No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.

Doug Dillon

Treat everyone you meet as if they were you.

John Updike

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

John Updike

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe

Jaeda DeWalt

Don't let others box you into their idea of what they think you should be. A confined identity is a miserable way to exist. Be you and live free. Trust that in living true to yourself, you will attract people that support and love you, just as you are.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Each person you meet is an aspect of yourself, clamoring for love.. Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Each person you meet
is an aspect of yourself,
clamoring for love.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital it becomes for you to discover just who is doing the creating.

Martin Gardner

We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains

Seth D.

Be like the flower, content with its nature.

Jodi LaPalm

I'm not the same person I was before, and I am deathly afraid I will never be her again...

Lindsay Detwiler

No one can soothe my inner being like you. No one can make me look to the future with such excitement like you did. No one can understand me, fulfill me, fit me like you did." ~Emma Ranstein

Meghan O'Rourke

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

Kiran Desai

When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?

Brennan Manning

While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.

Stormie Omartian

You must know that you are worth much to me whether you accomplish anything or not. Even if you are rejected in the world's eyes, you are valuable to me.

Brennan Manning

Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.

Brennan Manning

Live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone...
Scripture suggests that the essence of the divine nature is compassion and that the heart of God is defined by tenderness.

Alicia Britt Chole

In seasons of hiddenness our sense of value is disrupted, stripped of what "others" affirmed us to be. In this season God intends to give us an unshakable identity in Him, that no amount of adoration nor rejection can alter.

Ralph Ellison

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

Wesley Hill

Washed and waiting. That is my life – my identity as one who is forgiven and spiritually cleansed and my struggle as one who perseveres with a frustrating thorn in the flesh, looking forward to what God has promised to do. That is what this book is all about.

Stephen Dunn

I've tried

to become someone else for a while,
only to discover that he, too, was me.

Christina Davis

We are each what never leaves us, what we never see
the back of
is the self. But what loves us

is at the back, as Eurydice was
escorting him out
without his knowing.

William Shakespeare

I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

Orhan Pamuk

Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave.

Umberto Eco

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

Paul Graham

You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.

Doug Dillon

What would you say to yourself if you could actually meet a younger you?

Jennifer Elisabeth

I kept waiting for the part where I’d finally know who I was - some flashing, neon moment of relief, but it never came.

Darnell Houston

Identity

We live in a world where people define themselves by occupation. And we identify ourselves by what material possessions we have.
House,cars,money,clothes etc. Take away all that and you lost your identity. Sadly to say these are the things that hold a some relationships together.
So let me ask you one question. Who are you?

James Baldwin

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.

Michel Houellebecq

It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.

Brennan Manning

Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.

Stacy Hawkins Adams

She fixed a smile that she hoped looked authentic. Pretending to be content continued to be hard work.

Stacy Hawkins Adams

The door wasn’t closing. Shiloh’s spirit opened up as she considered the possibilities.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Our true self is made manifest in love.. Lailah Gifty Akita
Our true self is made manifest in love.

MercyMe

Could circumstances possibly change who I forever am in You?

Nick Hornby

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.

Anna Quindlen

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."

[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]

Johnnie Dent Jr.

Be as advertised.

André Breton

The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows

Michael Moorcock

Time is the enemy of identity

Gabriel Weston

This is when I became myself. The girl before this time is a shadow, like a soul who is practicing how not to become. She is the background, the hole in the fabric from which the real shape is cut.

J.G. Ballard

She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.

Doug Cooper

Time doesn't age you; experience does.

Gloria Ng

For my relationships with men to change, I needed to change my relationship to myself as a woman.

Jonathan Friesen

Frightened that you'll be overcome by yourself? That a gentle monster inside of you might take over and never let go?

Michael Bassey Johnson

You only know me as an ordinary human being, with flesh, blood and bones, but there is something about me too hard for you to decipher, for if i let you, you will ever regret knowing me.

Laurie Halse Anderson

The smoke shifted direction and I breathed in. Breathed out. On the inhale I was angry. On the exhale…there it was again. Fear. The fear made me angry and the anger made me afraid and I wasn’t sure who he was anymore. Or who I was.

George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it....

Jasmine Ann Cooray

I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign.

M.R. Graham

She knew where she stood, when she stood among books.

Steve Moore

There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn't me. I'm no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that.

Sebastian Barry

Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?

Jit Sharma

When the rose opens its heart, you will smell the fragrance of its soul.

Alan W. Watts

Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.

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