quotations about identity
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
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
Identity is a relation between our cognition of a thing, not between things themselves.
SIR. W. HAMILTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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?
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
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
It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.
PHILIP K. DICK
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I have a certain way of being in this world, and I shall not, I shall not be moved.
MAYA ANGELOU
Phenomenal Woman
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
No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Discourse on Inequality
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
COCO CHANEL
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Sea and the Mirror"
Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.
TANITH LEE, Wolf Queen
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
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
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