Identity Quotes

I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Sleep my little baby-ohSleep until you wakenWhen you wake you'll see the worldIf I'm not mistaken...Kiss a loverDance a measure,Find your nameAnd buried treasure...Face your lifeIts pain, Its pleasure,Leave no path untaken.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Veronica Roth

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

~ Brennan Manning

Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame
 and dignity. You are God's lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

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.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

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.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

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

~ Harvey Fierstein

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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.

~ Pascal Mercier

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

~ Jeanette Winterson

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

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.

~ Joseph Conrad

You know, people ask me. They say 'Dan, three years later do you really want to be drawing cat whiskers on your face?' but they don't understand. The cat whiskers, they come from within.

~ Dan Howell

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

~ Madonna

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.

~ Wendy Wasserstein

The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Be yourself. Don't worry about what other people are thinking of you, because they're probably feeling the same kind of scared, horrible feelings that everyone does.

~ Phil Lester

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.

~ 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.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, “There is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting.

~ Donald Van De Mark

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

~ Rupaul

One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.

~ K.l. Toth

Treat everyone you meet as if they were you.

~ Doug Dillon

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.

~ Christian Smith

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody. ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved. Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.

~ Max Barry

Deep within, there is something profoundly known, not consciously, but subconsciously. A quiet truth, that is not a version of something, but an original knowing. What this, absolute, truth [identity] is may be none of our business…but it is there, guiding us along the path of greater becoming; a true awareness. It is so self-sustaining that our recognition of it is not required. We are offspring’s of such a powerfully divine force – Creator of all things known and unknown.

~ T.f. Hodge

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.

~ Curtis Sittenfeld

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.

~ Robin Wasserman

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.

~ Stormie Omartian

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.

~ 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.

~ Brennan Manning

We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.

~ Wendell Berry

Others can't always define your true identity. They see what they 'want' to see but beyond your mess, God sees the beauty He created and still thinks it's good!

~ Chinonye J. Chidolue

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.

~ Alicia Britt Chole

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

~ Ralph Ellison

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.

~ Wesley Hill

You are not made in ‘your image’. You are, in fact, made in ‘God’s image’. Therefore, which one are you looking for when you look in the mirror?

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough