Identity Quotes

A man's true state of power and riches is to be in himself.

Henry Ward Beecher

Any child can tell you that the sole purpose of a middle name is so he can tell when he's really in trouble.

Dennis Frakes

If you want to be truly successful invest in yourself to get the knowledge you need to find your unique factor. When you find it and focus on it and persevere your success will blossom.

Sidney Madwed

How could I have been anything else but what I am, having been named Madonna. I would either have ended up a nun or this.

Madonna

I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name. How could I be anything else but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a nun or this.

Madonna

The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. If he loves, it is not to give himself, to blend in fecund union with another being, but to meditate on his love. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.

Emile Durkheim

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use --silence, exile and cunning.

James Joyce

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.

James Joyce

I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.

James Joyce

We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say. When your writing blooms out of the back of this garbage compost, it is very stable. You are not running from anything. You can have a sense of artistic security. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

Natalie Goldberg

I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.

Wendell Berry

That's his style of hitting . If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.

Yogi Berra

Observe all men, thyself most.

Benjamin Franklin

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.

Buddha

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

Milan Kundera

In England, I'm a horror movie director. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In the US, I'm a bum.

John Carpenter

Miss: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. Miss, Misses (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) are the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense. Two are corruptions of Mistress, the other of Master. If we must have them, let us be consistent and give one to the unmarried man. I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviated to MH.

Ambrose Bierce

My interest lies in my self-expression -- what's inside of me -- not what I'm in.

John Turturro

Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.

Tallulah Bankhead

Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes.

Abraham Maslow