quotations about identity
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
Identity is a relation between our cognition of a thing, not between things themselves.
SIR. W. HAMILTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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?
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
MARCEL PROUST, The Guermantes Way
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
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
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
We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Discourse on Inequality
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
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
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
People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.
BERTOLT BRECHT
In the Jungle of Cities
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"
No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
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
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
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow
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