quotations about identity
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
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letter to Clare Westcott, November 26, 1975
We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Discourse on Inequality
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
Sex ... or lack thereof ... is at the center of everyone's identity, and once you've cracked someone's desires, you understand them in full.
ARIANNE COHEN
Marie Claire Magazine, March 2008
It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
Be careful who you pretend to be. You might forget who you are.
ANONYMOUS
Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.
TANITH LEE, Wolf Queen
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
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'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
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
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
Identity is a relation between our cognition of a thing, not between things themselves.
SIR. W. HAMILTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
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?
There was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world.
MARY OLIVER
"The Journey", Dream Work
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
COCO CHANEL
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
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
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage--his name is self.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Sea and the Mirror"
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