Identity Quotes

Did he really want this warm room of his, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be transformed into a cave, in which, no doubt, he would be free to crawl about unimpeded in all directions, but only at the price of rapidly and completely forgetting his human past at the same time?

~ Franz Kafka

As I turned to leave the tent, she said, Don't worry. Your own mother wouldn't know you.I said, She never has.

~ Dean Koontz

I do the splits perfectly in PE. I lose half a pound in two days. I get the spinach and pig-meat frittata from the lo-carb section for lunch. And no-one else knows. I mentally construct a MyFace status, polishing the memories carefully until they shine. The need to record my life is as fundamental as my need to breathe. Without MyFace, I'm floating. I have nothing to anchor me down, to prove I exist.

~ Louise O'neill

If mistakes determine our worth, then we're all worthless.Thank God that's not the case.

~ Andrena Sawyer

Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept leaf is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the leaf: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted--but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Disconnect from society’s pressure to conform. Do things your own way.

~ Fennel Hudson

Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in order to keep the peace would inevitably end up subservient to them in everything.

~ Orson Scott Card

Freedom within is embodied in things as well as people. Like coins tossed into a wishing well, they contain our hopes and dreams.

~ Fennel Hudson

Wind is on fire - beautiful words. What causes the fire, what enhances it, and what finally extinguishes it by itself or by bringing in rainclouds, gets identified with it. Do breath and life have the same relationship with each other!

~ R. N. Prasher

I realise that a certain school of thought says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build our self out of what we think we remember.

~ Deirdre Madden

Storytellers are the keepers - we are the time keepers, the continuity keepers. We are the people who tell us who we are, where we've come from, and maybe even where we're going.

~ Bryce Courtenay

Rural and traditional escapism. That’s my angle. Places and events where we are free to relax and be ourselves, where nobody tells us to hurry along or conform or grow up. Somewhere we can properly live.

~ Fennel Hudson

Who are you? Answer, you are who you are in this given moment. Label-less. Limitless. Remember that from this day forward.

~ Connor Franta

Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our only defense must die into the ultimate truth of things, the black lightning that splits and destroys all, the positive, unquestionable nothingness.

~ William Golding

METAPHYSICAL LECTURE 1It has been said that after undergoing certain ordeals — whether ecstatic or abysmal — we should be obliged to change our names, as we are no longer who we once were. Instead the opposite rule is applied: our names linger long after anything resembling what we were, or thought we were, has disappeared entirely. Not that there was ever much to begin with — only a few questionable memories and impulses drifting about like snowflakes in a gray and endless winter. But each soon floats down and settles into a cold and nameless void.

~ Thomas Ligotti

They don't know who I am; what they do know, is that I'm not nothing, and that I'm not noone.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

You never know who anybody is. Even the people closest to you.

~ Jude Watson

Identity is not the face,Identity is not the trait,Neither is it the success pace,Nor is it the personality grace.Let alone it being your cliché phrase,Or did you think,It’s some religious faith?My child, it’s alarming that it’s none,It’s even not tongue,Then how can it be, what problems you have overcomeAnd the person you have become!This confused the little girl,and she was amidst a complex whirl,of thoughts, ideas and questions….What is it then, Father?You have declined already,all that mattered.I can think no more,of what makes an individual’s identity?Help me through, Help me carefully.(Poem: Identity, Book: Ginger and Honey)

~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

...modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.

~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Who were these people, these specially selected tenants? They were mothers and fathers and children. A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake.

~ Ellen Raskin

We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

~ Steve Jobs

People who made their dreams come true didn’t simply go after it. They changed the person they were, in order to fit the type of person that would live that type of dream.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Frightened that you'll be overcome by yourself? That a gentle monster inside of you might take over and never let go?

~ Jonathan Friesen

Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how are bank accounts describe us. What’s obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what’s bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary ticks and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed—we’re finally ourselves.

~ Gretel Ehrlich

What's wrong with me? I lose my footing, in here.' He touched his head. 'When a neuro-typical looses their footing, they yell or escape to the TV, or maybe the doctor throws them on depression meds. But when I slip, I fall all the way through. I feel the ground give way and I'm gone. It's a crack -- a crack in what's real, and beneath there I'm stuck. Then, I guess I become someone else. Mom says I still know my name, but I walk a different world. The shrink calls it DID -- Dissociative Identity Disorder -- with a little added autism to spice up my other personality. I suppose he's right, but only I know how it feels to slip through the cracks. Then the monster shows up.

~ Jonathan Friesen

Whose truth do you want to know, Dr. Amin Jaafari? The truth of a Bedouin who thinks he’s free and clear because he’s got an Israeli passport? The truth of a serviceable Arab per excellence who’s honored wherever he goes, who gets invited to fancy parties by people who want to show how tolerant and considerate they are? The truth of someone who thinks he can change sides like changing a shirt, with no trace left behind? Is that the truth you’re looking for, or is it the one you’re running away from? What planet do you live on, sir? … Our cities are being buried by machines on caterpillar tracks, our patron saints don’t know which way to turn, and you, simply because you’re nice and warm in your golden cage, refuse to see the inferno consuming us.

~ Yasmina Khadra

I have come to realise that the most critical of the social media accounts are the least verbal in real life and I can assure you that most social media trolls have no physical troll land to dwell.

~ Aysha Taryam

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to forget, he no longer remembered what he had said to F. three years before. Too bad for him. The memory might have alerted him, might have helped him see that his choice of medicine was wholly theoretical, made without the slightest self- knowledge. Thus he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? He walked down the broad outside staircase of the medical school for the last time, with the feeling that he was about to find himself alone on a platform all the trains had left.

~ Milan Kundera

The barber's assistant asks if I am a Swede. An American? Not that either. A Russian? Well, then, what are you? I love to answer such nationalistically tinted questions with a steely silence, and to leave people who ask me about my patriotic feelings in the dark. Or I tell lies and say that I'm Danish. Some kinds of frankness are only hurtful and boring.

~ Robert Walser

What makes you a chaffinch?

~ Helen Macdonald

In this world where I sit at my desk writing these words, people die, they pass on, people are mortal. In the cyber world we inhabit they do not.

~ Aysha Taryam

I knew that (job) had to be a humbling role for my dad, but he never allowed it to become humiliating work.

~ Jeremy Camp

Semantic search requires three things: Trust, Authority and Reputation. All three revolve around your digital profiles, their activity and the sentiment levels and engagement that each generates. Semantic search also requires differentiation – the ability of search to understand the “uniqueness” of you.

~ David Amerland

Of course, I’m aware of the animosities destroying brain cells on both sides, and I know all about the obstinacy of the warring parties, their refusal to reach an agreement, their devotion to their own murderous hatred….

~ Yasmina Khadra

Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.Search, a marketing method that didn't exist a decade ago, provides the most efficient and inexpensive way for businesses to find leads.

~ David Honegger

If I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you!

~ Menachem Mendel Morgensztern

You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

~ Julian Seifter

We are not what we do, we are not what we have, we are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth. I am the beloved child of a loving creator.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

In many cases you are not buying a product but an “identity enhancer.” Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore “exclusive.” If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.

~ Eckhart Tolle

A business needs a character and an identity, just like a person and just like a person it needs to have a Voice.

~ David Amerland