217 Quotes Tagged: identity

For determining the rational and the irrational, we employ not only our estimates of the value of external things, but also the criterion of that which is in keeping with one's own character. (Book I.2, 17p)

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.

"Who are you, Miss Snowe?"...
"Who am I indeed? Perhaps a personage in disguise."

Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about
shame and dignity.
You are God's lover,
yet you worry
what people
are saying.

She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.

She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of
herself. It is a dizzy hole of water and the rich
live in tall glass houses at the edge of it.

I had no doubt that I could do something, but what, and how? I had no contacts and I believed in nothing. And the obsession with my identity which I had developed in the factory hospital returned with a vengeance. Who was I, how had I come to be?

I fix myself, even when it causes great pain to do so, because I know that I cannot fix the way the world sees me.

Фантазия европейца так портится с каждым веком, что в конце концов станет невозможным не быть бесконечно тонким, когда не понимаешь, о чём речь.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Since the end of the postwar economic boom, certain strategies have been intensified to stimulate consumption, especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos.

"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.

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

It is not possible to preserve one's identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it. It is very hard indeed for a human being to sustain such an 'inner' split - conforming outwardly to one reality, while trying to maintain inwardly the value it denies.

What I am must make you forget what I wear.