quotations about identity
Disconnect your identity from what you produce, and that's a hard thing for us because we think of our significance, worth and value based on what we do instead of who we are.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
interview, Title Trakk: Your Christian Book
No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.
PHILIP K. DICK
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Identical strictly means "one and the same;" and if it were tied down to its strictest usage, it would indeed follow very logically, as we have said already, that no such thing as personal identity is possible.
SAMUEL BUTLER
"Personal Identity", Essays on Life, Art and Science
If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus
We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.
CHARLES DE LINT
Happily Ever After
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
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Identity is a relation between our cognition of a thing, not between things themselves.
SIR. W. HAMILTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.
BERTOLT BRECHT
In the Jungle of Cities
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow
As connected with the thought of other persons the self idea is always a consciousness of the peculiar or differentiated aspect of one's life, because that is the aspect that has to be sustained by purpose and endeavor, and its more aggressive forms tend to attach themselves to whatever one finds to be at once congenial to one's own tendencies and at variance with those of others with whom one is in mental contact. It is here that they are most needed to serve their function of stimulating characteristic activity, of fostering those personal variations which the general plan of life seems to require.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Discourse on Inequality
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
letter to Clare Westcott, November 26, 1975
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
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Sea and the Mirror"
When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself.
CESARE PAVESE
The Beach
They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
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