Identity Quotes

Whenever a person is the object of your activity, remember that you may not treat that person as only the means to an end, as in instrument, but must allow for the fact that he or she, too, has or at least should have, distinct personal ends.

~ John Paul Ii

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

~ V.s. Ramachandran

She stampeed. “I am making him run late.”She gave a resolution of exact 60 seconds to herself to see if she can find her diamond necklace or else she would attend the party with out it.She suddenly turned, as if her memory shouted out loud- Its on the chest right there!To her bewilderment, he was standing just a few inches away holding a big mirror in hand.That perplexed her. Not Adam. Not even the fact that her neck was already hosting the necklace.But seeing herself that way, her very own self. As if, she was unapprehended she existed.Adam was expecting a smile on her face, and that she would touch the necklace and say- “Oh my foolish self” but she touched her face and said- “Oh my self...”That was foolish!

~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

~ Hafiz

Oh honey, have you learned nothing from these plays? Ain't such a line between faking and being.

~ Gayle Forman

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.

~ Jasmine Ann Cooray

The adoptee benefits because his collective parents are permitted to grow secure in their particular roles in his life. His adoptive parents are not unwittingly encouraged to compete to possess him. Nor are his birth parents punished and banished from a place in his life.

~ Kathleen Silber

We fluff them and fold them and nudge them and enhance them and bind them and break them and embellish them beyond measure; then, as we drive them up to the college interviews that they’ve heard since birth are the gateway to the lives they were destined to lead based on nothing more than our own need for it to be true, we tell them, with a smile so tight it would crack nuts, 'Just be yourself.

~ Heather Choate Davis

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?

~ Charles Yu

You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it’s a catch-22: all of those things that you’re willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself.

~ Jodi Picoult

No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But what then ... what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is. The idea scares me some.

~ Suzanne Collins

It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wide iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.

~ Trish Deseine

It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.

~ Trish Deseine

Brillat-Savarin, said: ‘Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are.’ He had it wrong. It’s not just what we eat that shows who we are, it’s what we buy but don’t eat that says more about the people we think we are. Or want to be. Look at the ingredients in your cupboards. All those hopes and dreams.

~ Kate Lord Brown

My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The I in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Silence has built walls, walls that I attempt to break by pedaling faster, only to be imprisoned a hundred feet down the road.

~ Doug Cooper

Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.

~ George R.r. Martin

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

~ Oscar Wilde

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We know what we are, but not what we may be.

~ William Shakespeare

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

~ Orson Scott Card

You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Who are you?No one of consequence.I must know.Get used to disappointment.

~ William Goldman

I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.

~ Beatrice Sparks

What's in a name? that which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet.

~ William Shakespeare

I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.

~ George Macdonald

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

~ David Sedaris

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

~ Bob Dylan

You know what I am. The words breathed out in an auguished whisper. I'm part demon, Clary. Part demon. You understood that much, didn't you? His eyes bored into her like drills. You saw what Valentine was trying to do. He used demon blood-used it on me before I was even born. I'm part monster. Part everthing I've tried so hard to burn out, to destroy.

~ Cassandra Clare

I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I realize then that it's not enough to know what someone is called. You have to know who they are.

~ Gayle Forman

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

~ John Berger

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing.

~ John O'donohue

I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn't comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.

~ Marjane Satrapi

The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.

~ John O'donohue

Without dignity, identity is erased.

~ Laura Hillenbrand

I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.

~ Audre Lorde