IDENTITY QUOTES IV

quotations about identity

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


What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself.

CESARE PAVESE

The Beach


What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair


All we are not stares back at what we are.

W. H. AUDEN

"The Sea and the Mirror"


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


I have a certain way of being in this world, and I shall not, I shall not be moved.

MAYA ANGELOU

Phenomenal Woman


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


Identity is a relation between our cognition of a thing, not between things themselves.

SIR. W. HAMILTON

attributed, Day's Collacon


We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Discourse on Inequality


It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.

PHILIP K. DICK

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?


People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.

BERTOLT BRECHT

In the Jungle of Cities


It is not a slight thing, gentlemen, to force a man to say what he is, or what he believes himself to be; for that supreme word of man, that single expression which he utters of and upon himself is decisive. It lays down the basis upon which all judgment of him is to be formed. From that moment all the acts of his life must correspond to the answer given by him.

HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE

Jesus Christ: Conferences Delivered at Notre Dame in Paris


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

Tags: Marshall McLuhan


No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Blind Willow


There was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

No Country for Old Men


A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.

COCO CHANEL

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel

Tags: Coco Chanel


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


People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.

GREGORY BENFORD

Foundation's Fear


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