quotations about identity
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 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
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
COCO CHANEL
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
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
What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself.
CESARE PAVESE
The Beach
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
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
This also shows wherein the identity of the same man consists, viz. in participation of the same continued life by particles of matter successively united to the same organized body.
JOHN LOCKE
Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding
It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage--his name is self.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.
ERIK ERIKSON
"The Problem of Ego Identity", Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person.... They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.
NORMAN MAILER
Harlot's Ghost
This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before.
AYN RAND
Anthem