c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the "leaf": the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted--but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Disconnect from society’s pressure to conform. Do things your own way.
— Fennel Hudson, A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in order to keep the peace would inevitably end up subservient to them in everything.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Freedom within is embodied in things as well as people. Like coins tossed into a wishing well, they contain our hopes and dreams.
— Fennel Hudson, A Waterside Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 2
Wind is on fire" - beautiful words. What causes the fire, what enhances it, and what finally extinguishes it by itself or by bringing in rainclouds, gets identified with it. Do breath and life have the same relationship with each other!
— R. N. Prasher
I realise that a certain school of thought says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build our self out of what we think we remember.
— Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox's Birthday: A Novel
Storytellers are the keepers - we are the time keepers, the continuity keepers. We are the people who tell us who we are, where we've come from, and maybe even where we're going.
— Bryce Courtenay
Rural and traditional escapism. That’s my angle. Places and events where we are free to relax and be ourselves, where nobody tells us to hurry along or conform or grow up. Somewhere we can properly live.
— Fennel Hudson, A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1
Who are you? Answer
—  you are who you are in this given moment. Label-less. Limitless. Remember that from this day forward.
Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our only defense must die into the ultimate truth of things, the black lightning that splits and destroys all, the positive, unquestionable nothingness.
— William Golding
METAPHYSICAL LECTURE 1It has been said that after undergoing certain ordeals — whether ecstatic or abysmal — we should be obliged to change our names, as we are no longer who we once were. Instead the opposite rule is applied: our names linger long after anything resembling what we were, or thought we were, has disappeared entirely. Not that there was ever much to begin with — only a few questionable memories and impulses drifting about like snowflakes in a gray and endless winter. But each soon floats down and settles into a cold and nameless void.
— Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco
Jesus, why would he hook up with Becca?" "Well, she's not known for her personality or generosity of spirit, so it's probably because she's hot." "She's not as hot as you," I said, before I could think better of it. "That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.
— John Green, Paper Towns
They don't know who I am; what they do know, is that I'm not nothing, and that I'm not noone.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
You never know who anybody is. Even the people closest to you.
— Jude Watson, In Too Deep
Identity is not the face,Identity is not the trait,Neither is it the success pace,Nor is it the personality grace.Let alone it being your cliché phrase,Or did you think,It’s some religious faith?My child, it’s alarming that it’s none,It’s even not tongue,Then how can it be, what problems you have overcomeAnd the person you have become!This confused the little girl,and she was amidst a complex whirl,of thoughts, ideas and questions….What is it then, Father?You have declined already,all that mattered.I can think no more,of what makes an individual’s identity?Help me through, Help me carefully.(Poem: Identity, Book: Ginger and Honey)
— Jasleen Kaur Gumber, Ginger and Honey
In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen someting before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, "This guy comes with us," I think it wasn't just an accident, it was as clear a sign as I would ever get that I was going to enter the life of the artist. I was going to disrobe myself, I was going to put on a new identity, I was going to be somebody else.
— Philip Glass
...modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.
— Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Who were these people, these specially selected tenants? They were mothers and fathers and children. A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake.
— Ellen Raskin
We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
— Steve Jobs
People who made their dreams come true didn’t simply go after it. They changed the person they were, in order to fit the type of person that would live that type of dream.
— Shannon L. Alder
Frightened that you'll be overcome by yourself? That a gentle monster inside of you might take over and never let go?
— Jonathan Friesen, Both of Me
Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how are bank accounts describe us. What’s obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what’s bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary ticks and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed—we’re finally ourselves.
— Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces
What's wrong with me? I lose my footing, in here.' He touched his head. 'When a neuro-typical looses their footing, they yell or escape to the TV, or maybe the doctor throws them on depression meds. But when I slip, I fall all the way through. I feel the ground give way and I'm gone. It's a crack -- a crack in what's real, and beneath there I'm stuck. Then, I guess I become someone else. Mom says I still know my name, but I walk a different world. The shrink calls it DID -- Dissociative Identity Disorder -- with a little added autism to spice up my other personality. I suppose he's right, but only I know how it feels to slip through the cracks. Then the monster shows up.
— Jonathan Friesen, Both of Me
Whose truth do you want to know, Dr. Amin Jaafari? The truth of a Bedouin who thinks he’s free and clear because he’s got an Israeli passport? The truth of a serviceable Arab per excellence who’s honored wherever he goes, who gets invited to fancy parties by people who want to show how tolerant and considerate they are? The truth of someone who thinks he can change sides like changing a shirt, with no trace left behind? Is that the truth you’re looking for, or is it the one you’re running away from? What planet do you live on, sir? … Our cities are being buried by machines on caterpillar tracks, our patron saints don’t know which way to turn, and you, simply because you’re nice and warm in your golden cage, refuse to see the inferno consuming us.
— Yasmina Khadra, The Attack
I have come to realise that the most critical of the social media accounts are the least verbal in real life and I can assure you that most social media trolls have no physical troll land to dwell.
— Aysha Taryam
When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to forget, he no longer remembered what he had said to F. three years before. Too bad for him. The memory might have alerted him, might have helped him see that his choice of medicine was wholly theoretical, made without the slightest self- knowledge. Thus he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? He walked down the broad outside staircase of the medical school for the last time, with the feeling that he was about to find himself alone on a platform all the trains had left.
— Milan Kundera
The barber's assistant asks if I am a Swede. An American? Not that either. A Russian? Well, then, what are you? I love to answer such nationalistically tinted questions with a steely silence, and to leave people who ask me about my patriotic feelings in the dark. Or I tell lies and say that I'm Danish. Some kinds of frankness are only hurtful and boring.
— Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten
What makes you a chaffinch?
— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
In this world where I sit at my desk writing these words, people die, they pass on, people are mortal. In the cyber world we inhabit they do not.
— Aysha Taryam
I knew that (job) had to be a humbling role for my dad, but he never allowed it to become humiliating work.
— Jeremy Camp, I Still Believe
Semantic search requires three things: Trust, Authority and Reputation. All three revolve around your digital profiles, their activity and the sentiment levels and engagement that each generates. Semantic search also requires differentiation – the ability of search to understand the “uniqueness” of you.
— David Amerland, SEO Help: 20 Semantic Search Steps that Will Help Your Business Grow
Of course, I’m aware of the animosities destroying brain cells on both sides, and I know all about the obstinacy of the warring parties, their refusal to reach an agreement, their devotion to their own murderous hatred….
— Yasmina Khadra, The Attack
Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.Search, a marketing method that didn't exist a decade ago, provides the most efficient and inexpensive way for businesses to find leads.
— David Honegger
If I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you!
— Menachem Mendel Morgensztern
You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.
— Julian Seifter
We are not what we do, we are not what we have, we are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth. I am the beloved child of a loving creator.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen
In many cases you are not buying a product but an “identity enhancer.” Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore “exclusive.” If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A business needs a character and an identity, just like a person and just like a person it needs to have a Voice.
— David Amerland, SEO Help: 20 Semantic Search Steps that Will Help Your Business Grow
The StrangerLooking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heartof the street to the riverwalking the rivers of the avenuesfeeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphaltwatching the lights turn on in the towerswalking as I’ve walked beforelike a man, like a woman, in the citymy visionary anger cleansing my sightand the detailed perceptions of mercyflowering from that angerif I come into a room out of the sharp misty lightand hear them talking a dead languageif they ask me my identitywhat can I say butI am the androgyneI am the living mind you fail to describein your dead languagethe lost noun, the verb survivingonly in the infinitivethe letters of my name are written under the lidsof the newborn child
— Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck
It is important to realize that we so often define ourselves by what is in opposition to ourselves.
— Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times
This constant mental diatribe and the frustrations, worries, insecurities and muscular tension that ensues are the self.
— Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times
Group membership can modify individuals' perceptions of themselves. Unable to separate their personal introspection from the ways they believe other people perceive them, teenagers may have what psychologists call an "imaginary audience", meaning that they believed that other people are just as attuned to their appearance and behavior as they are.
— Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School
That nagging state of constant thought that exists somewhere between the ears and behind the eyes is the self.
— Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times
We tend to view ourselves as this, lying in contradiction with everything that is not ourselves, that.
— Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times
We are forever lured by the sirens of the dogmatic mind, with its haughty complacency, which determines that one´s relationship to others is only meaningful when one tries to convince them of one´s single truth. In such a spiritual and intellectual climate, holding a dialogue consists of speaking, but never of listening - the other is the privileged scope of my proselytism. My truth thus becomes a blind and blinding passion - it imprisons me, even as it was supposed to liberate me; it has become a source of alienation.
— Tariq Ramadan
We can witness collective movements alarmingly influenced by genuine social phobias and affecting the most industrialized and educated societies. Exclusive identities are being asserted, singular affiliations are being stressed, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize the other in the mirror of one´s own quest. Reducing the other to the sole expression of his or her "difference" is one of the stages of dehumanization; and law alone - let alone the right to equality - cannot suffice to remedy the situation. Here comes the time of the new "barbarians".
— Tariq Ramadan, Tariq Ramadan: On Super-Diversity
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For 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 up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky....They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same....Look at them leaving in droves, despite knowing they will be welcomed with restraint in those strange lands because they do not belong
— NoViolet Bulawayo
What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don't know what it is I'm capable of transforming into.
— Nick Flynn, The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that itexists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest isconstruction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothingbut water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all thoselikewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility orthis vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable tome. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap willnever be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia atthe same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in preciselyso far as they are approximate.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Your identity doesn't come from your address.
— Denise Hunter, A December Bride
The very fact that we need to struggle for approval proves that we do not approve of ourselves. Having to convince ourselves of something means we do not really believe it. That is why we contort ourselves grotesquely, lose sight of who we really are, and tangle ourselves pathetically in a complicated falsification of our lives.
— C. Terry Warner
Basing your identity on sexuality is like building a house on a foundation of pudding. - D. Travers Scott
— Carol Queen, PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality
Who do I write for? I thought about this again and again over the next few days until the answer crystalized in my consciousness. I write for all readers. But my primary interest is in representing the complex but universal experience of Somalis. I do this because the media representation of the global Somali community is one that is carved out of derivative clichés crammed with pirates, warlords, terrorists, passive women and girls whose entire existence seems to be nothing more than a footnote on the primitive dangers of female genital mutilation. I write because I want to give a long-overdue voice to a community that has experienced a tremendous array of challenges but who constantly face these challenges with the most wicked sense of humour, humility and dignity. My father always used to tell me that in our culture, the done thing when you’re facing hardship and your belly is empty is to moisturize your face, comb your hair, press your clothes and step out into the sun with your sense of humanity intact. It’s a lesson I’ve carried with me to this day.
— Diriye Osman
Being gay is not just what I do, but who I am. It is part of how I choose to live my life even if I never chose.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For 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 thoselikewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.
— Albert Camus
Slowly, but steadily, my feelings did start to change- feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't. I -like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian -felt very comfortable, very at home in mu body in my lesbianism. One doesn't repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of my sin. I don't mean different incidents or examples of the same sin, but different facets of sin -how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness. I have walked this journey with help. There is no other way to do it I still walk this journey with help.
— Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
She already loved me too much to see me as I was.
— André Gide
The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Roman Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or anti-fascism. In both cases the method remains exactly the same: a person stubbornly defending the superiority of cats over other animals is doing basically the same thing as one who maintains that Mussolini was the sole saviour of Italy: he is proud of this attribute of the self and he tries to make this attribute (a cat or Mussolini) acknowledged and loved by everyone.Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.
— Milan Kundera
I'll never suppress my identity -- that's like filing away your fingerprints so the money can slide into your pockets easier.
— Jonathan Heatt
Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.
— Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away
And this is when I knew I was black for real.This is when I knew black was a citywhose walls were constantly under siege....
— Roger Bonair-Agard, Bury My Clothes
There are varieties of life unknown to you.Their whole identity is: you can't find out.
— Dan Chiasson, Where's the Moon, There's the Moon: Poems
[O]nce we give up on the idea that only heterosexuality is normal and that all human bodies are clearly either male or female, more and more kinds of bodies and desires will come into view. Perhaps also, one body may, in one lifetime, move through many identities and desires. The use of,queer’ then, is a deliberate political move, which underscores the fluidity (potential and actual) of sexual identity and sexual desire. The term suggests that all kinds of sexual desire and identifications are possible, and all these have socio-cultural and historical co-ordinates.
— Nivedita Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist
We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard defining edges.
— Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
What we love we are.
— Robert Lowell
Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus' baptism, when the devil says to him, "If you are the Son of God…" he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God. So if God's first move is to give us our identity, then the devil's first move is to throw that identity into question.
— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature..... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.'Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.'When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World
Can't nobody make us do a thang once we git hard against it. And if anybody don't like that, you don't have to explain a thang to'm. All you got to say is, 'I'm Charlotte Simmons, and I don't hold with thangs like 'at.' And they'll respect you for that.
— Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons
Your voice is your identity. If you don't use it, your halfway to Asphodel already.
— Rick Riordan
That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales...
— Tony Kushner
She said to herself: 'Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn it—infants, angels, priests, the dead; why—should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?' She thought: 'He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special; in a room that giving back evidence of his occupancy, is as mauled as the last agony.
— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer, etc., etc., they change hairdos, tailors, spouses, accents, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose image is theirs to emulate or to repudiate obsessively for life.
— Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession
Be as advertised.
— Johnnie Dent Jr.
The more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
He was sorry for himself as well, for he was doomed to find life and identity in death letters.
— Mahesh Poudyal, Hulaki
Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?
— Douglas Coupland
I don't own you, you just belong to me.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
I don’t know who I am. And I don’t think people ever will know who they are. We have to be humble enough to learn to live with this mysterious question. Who am I? So, I am a mystery to myself. I am someone who is in this pilgrimage from the moment that I was born to the day to come that I’m going to die. And this is something that I can’t avoid, whether I like it or not, or — I’m going to die. So, what I have to do is to honor this pilgrimage through life. And so I am this pilgrim — if I can somehow answer your question — who’s constantly amazed by this journey. Who is learning a new thing every single day. But who’s not accumulating knowledge, because then it becomes a very heavy burden in your back. I am this person who is proud to be a pilgrim, and who’s trying to honor his journey.
Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The idea of reappropriation isn’t a new one. The process of turning negative words, symbols, or ideas into positive parts of our own identity – was used for social justice movements long before hipsters thought that being ironic was cool. Whether it is repurposing a racial epithet or taking on a stereotype for sociopolitical empowerment, it’s an important process that has been around for thousands of years and continues to change society today.
— Simon S. Tam
I tried on different versions of myself. I was so many different girls...
— Jennifer Elisabeth
What we invent, we become
— Marty Rubin
I open my eyes and for the first time stare openly at my own reflection. My heart rate picks up as I do, like I am breaking the rules and will be scolded for it. It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else. …Looking at myself now isn’t like seeing myself for the first time; it’s like seeing someone else for the first time. Beatrice was a girl I saw in stolen moments at the mirror, who kept quiet at the dinner table. This is someone whose eyes claim mine and don’t release me; this is Tris.
— Veronica Roth, Divergent
I am myself when I get up, I am myself throughout the day and I am myself when I go back to sleep, you probably might have met someone else when I was asleep and claimed it to be changed me.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
What others say about you is irrelevant. You define who you are.
— Michele Vail, Unchosen
I don’t subscribe to the notion of seeing no color, that we’re all the same and race doesn’t exist. It’s a social and political reality that we live in. The problem when people say we should concentrate on similarities is that they’re ignoring glaring parts of our humanness—our skin, perhaps the color of our hair, the way we speak, or even the shape of our eyes.
— Simon S. Tam
The way you treat others determines the way others treat you
—  the way others treat you determines the way you see yourself
Facebook is the perfect place to try on different identities until she finds one that sticks.
— Brooke Hauser, The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens
So now, when I look back, all I see is who we used to be and who we are now. And I wonder how anybody can recognize anyone at all.
— Susan Pogorzelski, Gold in the Days of Summer
I think about how maybe it's not things that change but people that change, and maybe that's the change everyone is really talking about.
— Susan Pogorzelski, Gold in the Days of Summer
A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.
— John   Williams
Just as in the physical world, people within virtual worlds perform and cycle through different roles and identities. Virtual worlds make such shifts explicit, as well as introducing spaces for play and performance.
— Tom Boellstorff, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method
The Only mattered to him.Iconoclasm.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
All this sea of humanity reassured me that as alien as i felt, there were always others in the world far odder than I
— Richard C. Morais, The Hundred-Foot Journey
The most important things to be acquired for freedom and democracy, are identity and dignity.
— King Michael of Romania
I can be anything you want but definitely not a wannabe.
— Pushpa Rana
All pain in life comes from suppressing your true identity.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
I mean, in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we're born.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
We are caught in the in between of what we already are what we are yet to be.
— Tenth Avenue North
Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world's confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Could circumstances possibly change who I forever am in You?
— MercyMe
It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what he saw. He had a glimpse of a figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and through the pages of cheap fiction - a pitiable fellow going into his middle-age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity, and contempt. He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar it became. It was not himself that he saw, and he knew suddenly that it was no one.
— John  Williams, Stoner
How would I know which one I was?
— Karl Pilkington
The concept of reconciliation is not irretrievable, but I am convinced that before we theologians can interpret the depths of the divine action of reconciliation we must first articulate the profound deformities of Christian intimacy and identity in modernity. Until we do, all theological discussions of reconciliation will be exactly what they tend to be: (a) ideological tools for facilitating negotiations of power; or (b) socially exhausted idealist claims masquerading as serious theological accounts. In truth, it is not at all clear that most Christians are ready to imagine reconciliation.
— Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
Who you are; that is, who you choose to be — your identity, works in your life like an invisible hand.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
The greatest challenge on the Web in the twenty-first century is to connect with your target audience in a way that enriches both them and you.
— David Amerland, Google+ Hangouts for Business: How to use Google+ Hangouts to Improve Brand Impact, Build Business and Communicate in Real-Time
Apparently, a week Japan was laughable; but a strong Japan was immediately transformed into the prime example of a "Yellow Peril". Might Japan forever be stuck in a kind of no man's land between East and West, not allowed to assimilate into the international order of the Western nations as an equal, forever grouped with the countries of the East among which she felt herself superior, and respected fully by neither group?
— Charles Emmerson, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
The border between personal and transpersonal experience is a complex region. It is a territory often filled with spiritual and religious views. Within psychology it was a significant preoccupation of William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and many others. But these margins may be seen in other ways as well. There is substantial evidence from psychological studies of personal space that we carry body boundaries of extended space around ourselves. These spatial extensions are not only personal. They may be felt by groups as well—in terms of shared “social” space, communal territories, or even national identities.
— Richard J. Borden, Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective
He'd lived so long in anticipation of his own death that to contemplate his future was like standing at the edge of a cliff, staring into a vertiginous rush of open sky.
— Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni
No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of ide
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be.
— Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours
If you can accept the indescribable nature of your true identity, you unveil the mystery of life.
— Akemi G, Why We Are Born: Remembering Our Purpose through the Akashic Records
The gap that was created during those transatlantic voyages hundreds of years ago.That gap is the matrix of Saudade – The Longing, I think, that all Africans in the West have, that is at the root of the blues and jazz and soul and rap. If you listen you can hear it, elusive, fleeting, full of melancholy anger.
— Bonnie Greer, A Parallel Life
No, my life is not this precipitous hourthrough which you see me passing at a run.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours
The official erasure of any existence before enslavement – as if black Americans did not exist before the yolk and the chains and whip – has always created a passion for us.Black people need to find out. We have to find out Who We Are and Where We Come From.
— Bonnie Greer, A Parallel Life
With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before—simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he still knew so little about him.
— Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening
She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.
— J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights
She breathes all the political gases that flow around this, but she never seems to inhale them.
— John F. Kennedy
I’m not just a face, or a body. I’m a Havisham.
— Ronald Frame, Havisham
I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.
— Lauren Slater, Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother
Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.
— Lauren Slater, The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals
...tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.... the window rosy with anemic November light.
— Lauren Slater, The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals
So often I'm like, No, thanks, to all of that stuff, just give me the room to exist both in the shit and stars . . . We have to fight to be understood as being distinct and incongruent. But I think it is worth fighting for.
— Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
...the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.
— Lauren Slater, The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals
I looked up "skin" in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function.
— Lauren Slater, Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother
I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.
— Lauren Slater, The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals
They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond.
— Lauren Slater, Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother
The ultimate barrier against love is the barrier of the constructed self.
— Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset: An Unconventional Guide to Healing and Happiness
Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very closely to what people say to one another about him, whether it's good or bad, because it indicates that he lives in the same world they do, and that all his fears about being invisible, impotent, lacking some mysterious dimension that other people have, are groundless.
— Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place
A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could have daring syntax and clever cacophony, it could have a neat and ordered rhyme scheme...but, if it loses its authenticity, its ability to convey the very heart and soul of the poet, then all the euphony and cacophony in the world cannot make up for the loss of its identity as a poem. And that is the true cacophony.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney
A person is an objective entity, which as a definite subject has the closest contacts with the whole (external) world and is most intimately involved with it precisely because of its inwardness, its interior life.
— John Paul II
Valuing names as they do, Realists are sparing with them. They are likely to be known only as Joe or Bill or Plato. And they don't smile much. Nominalists have more fun. They are known as Aristotle or Decimus-et-Ultimus Barziza, or as Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montague, or perhaps by one name in childhood and several others in the course of life.  A firm Realist misses out on one of the most satisfying of all human activities -- the assumption of secret identities. A man who has lived and never been someone else has never lived.  It is true that occasionally there can be embarrassment in secret identities, but only a Realist will take the whole thing seriously enough to hit you. So have your fun, and avoid Realists.
— Alexei Panshin, The Thurb Revolution
When the lord gives a human a life to live with and all the things they need, why do the humans give back the money to the lord ? Are humans that crazy ? Or do we have a mask of saying it out instead of delivering what is called as mankind ?
— Rakesh Akuthota
Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice nor why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp.
— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
What a man finds circa se or sub se is overwhelming in amount, what he finds in se is embarassing in its obscurity, but when from his own being he would obtain light as to what is supra se, then indeed he finds himself face to face with a dark and somewhat terrifying mystery. The trouble is that he is himself involved in the mystery. If, in any true sense, man is an image of God, how should he know himself without knowing God? But if it is really of God that he is an image, how should he know himself?
— Étienne Gilson
Until the ego dissolves or evolves to become one with our true self, we remain slaves of our own egos.
— Assegid Habtewold, The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For Continued Success in Leadership
In just a few weeks, Soldier 13 became aware of a mutation in the colors of his consciousness. As the theoretical classes were filling his brain with philosophical, historical, and political arguments to make his faith unbreakable, the sessions with the psychologists were draining his mind of the deadweight of experiences, memories, fears, and illusions forged of the course of a life of a past that he detached himself from as if they were skinning him. He was overwhelmed to see how his personal history was becoming a foggy haze and how even recent events, like Kotov's last recommendations before he returned to Spain, seemed to diffuse that he sometimes asked himself if he hadn't lived them in another remote and murky existence.During those months was when Ramon really began to stop being Ramon and only became him against when the man they were turning him into was suffocating and, to save him, the former Ramon Mercader had to come to the surface. Or whenever they ordered him to go out and get some sun. But he was never again the same Ramon Mercader del Rio.p. 208
— Leonardo Padura, El hombre que amaba a los perros
As the social matrix becomes increasingly subject to rapid fluctuations, throwing out anchors into a collectivised past becomes more prominent than movement into a future. The desire to establish a core identity within the profusion of styles has led to image building becoming an industry in itself—as much reflected by the tactics of political groups and corporate bodies, as in the fetishistic scramble for designer labels and trendy occult symbols. Identity has, therefore, become another commodity to be traded in the marketplace. The gulf between objective icons and the Illusory has widened to such an extent that illusions have come to equal value.
— Phil Hine, Rebels and Devils: The Psychology of Liberation
It's my diary", she'd explained. "Every mark I've had drawn on my skin connects me to where and who I've been- so I never forget who I am and how I got here."There was humour in the smile she offered him. "And you know what the real beauty of it is?" Hank had shaken his head. "Nobody can take it away.
— Charles de Lint, Someplace to Be Flying
Be as thou wast wont to be.
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Be as thou wast wont to be.See as thou wast wont to see.
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
A mask is what we wear to hide from ourselves.
— Khang Kijarro Nguyen
The waves splash against my face, carrying a message: Welcome, you belong here.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day. The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside. There was nothing to link them; he was the sole link. Here life ceased to obstruct or assault him. Here was a place where humanity was not always pushing, rushing, running as if with a fire at its back
— Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland
To exist here, I’ll have to become skilled in saying no—an art in which I was once well accomplished, but one I no longer care to practice.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought.
— Frank Plumpton Ramsey, Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays
I am two people. One goes through the motions, rolling from one thing to the next; the other is withdrawn, watching a complete stranger.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
Nothing worse than someone who goes to the dance, is excited to dance, dances all night, and then complains all the next day about his feet being sore.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In