217 Quotes Tagged: identity

Not the perception of the proportion of things outside of us but the experience of identification with whatever's outside of us (this is obviously a physical impossibility ; that's why it's a mental responsibility).

A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.

Let me forever go in search of myself; never for a moment think that I have found myself; be as a stranger to myself, never a familiar, seeking acquaintance still. May I be to myself as one is to me whom I love, a dear and cherished object.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."

[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]

I’m a magician with no magic, and that’s no one at all.

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

Everything is music for the born musician.

"Nelson Mandela once said, "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, "I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

If only you could see the greatness in yourself, you wouldn't envy the greatness in others.

Autonomous man is a device used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way. He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does not dehumanize man, it de-homunculizes him, and it must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the human species. To man qua man we readily say good riddance. Only by dispossessing him can we turn to the real causes of human behaviour. Only then can we turn from the inferred to the observed, from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable.

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

She already loved me too much to see me as I was.

I read “The Second Sex.”
Simone explained that if women peed standing up, their perception of life would change.
So I tried. It ran lightly down my left leg. It was a little disgusting.
Seated, it was much simpler. And as an Iranian woman, before learning to urinate like a man, I needed to learn to become a liberated and emancipated woman.

"Ogni mediazione proietta un suo miraggio; i miraggi si susseguono come altrettante "verità" che subentrino alle verità anteriori come una vera e propria uccisione del ricordo vivente e si proteggano dalle verità future con una censura implacabile dell'esperienza quotidiana. Marcel Proust chiama "Io" i "mondi" proiettati dalle successive mediazioni. Gli Io sono perfettamente isolati gli uni dagli altri, incapaci di rammentarsi degli Io passati o di presagire gli Io futuri."