Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Identity.
Our lives teach us who we are.
Salman Rushdie
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
Other men's sins are before our eyes; our own are behind our backs.
Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand --like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery --in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.
Walter Benjamin
One of the tragic ironies of history is that such original and creative geniuses as Buddha and Jesus have been extolled as perfect patterns for all to emulate. In the very struggle to be like someone else rather than to be one's own true self, or to do one's own best in one's own environment, a child is in danger of losing the pearl that is really beyond price - the integrity of his (or her) own soul.
Sophia Lyon Fahs, Today's Childr
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
William Hazlitt
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb
Our faith acknowledges that no two people think, believe, taste, feel, hear, or encounter life in the same way. Those who are disciplined, for whatever reason, to conform to a single commonly held creed seek their own truthful and compassionate ways to live. We give our approval and seek acceptance because it is validating. It frees us to become our best selves. It is our very differences that make it necessary to practice acceptance toward one another.
Carolyn OwenTowle
The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.
Gertrude Stein
Few men are of one plain, decided color; most are mixed, shaded or blended; and vary as much from different situations, as changeable silks do from different lights.
Philip Dormer Stanhope
Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
Soren Kierkegaard
Once you label me you negate me.
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
Quentin Crisp
Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?
Marilyn French
It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
Virginia Woolf
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
Jean Kerr
What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere -- it is an art form in itself.
Anita Brookner
At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
