Quotes & Sayings About Finding One's Identity

Cultivating good humor may be helpful in finding our own identity. Young people who are trying to find out who they really are often have concerns as to their ability to meet and cope with the challenges that confront them and that lie ahead. They will find that it is easier to ride over the bumps and come quickly to their own identity if they cultivate the good humor that comes naturally. It is important that we all learn to laugh at ourselves. — James E. Faust

Then as he had kept watch Sam had noticed that at times a light seemed to be shining faintly within; but now the light was even clearer and stronger. Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiseling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: I love him. He's like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Being indie means being artistic and finding your own eccentric identity. The name of the game for being an indie kid is to never admit you are one. If you do, it goes against your beliefs against labeling, thus making you a hypocrite. — Alexandra Robbins

When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person. — W. Kamau Bell

I realise and finally acknowledge that at the core I am only a lover. Of life. Of beauty. Of love. Of being in love. Of kindness. Of words. Of conversations. Of dreams. Of imagination. Of ideas. Of realness. Of vulnerability. Of solitude. Of Silences. Of companionship. Of poetry. Of music. Of movement. Of stillness. Of energy. And, when the lover in me is stifled,starved, not finding resonance, is misunderstood, is dulled or ignored, I question my very existence because I do not feel alive. When the lover in me dies, everything in me dies. I realise that my inner fire is only a lover. I have no other identity of self than as a lover. — Srividya Srinivasan

You drink from the source to become the source. You lose your identity in Him to become like Him."
Secrets to Divine Manifestation: Finding Your Life Purpose Through the Rebirth of Your Soul — Alain Yaovi M. Dagba

I was adopted by a Salvadorian mother and a white father. Growing up having complete identity crisis. Then my search for my mother and trying to find out why I was given up, and how could a mother give up a child, then finding out the circumstances of my birth was pretty traumatizing. — Gina Prince-Bythewood

But, do not stay there. Spiritual adulthood has higher goals than "finding yourself." A reactive stage is a stage, not an identity. It is necessary, but not sufficient. — Henry Cloud

I'm right at a time when I'm strongly finding my identity inside of my work. — Josh Lucas

Committing yourself is a way of finding out who you are. A man finds his identity by identifying. — Robert E. Terwilliger

When we notice a connection between our present fears and their origins in early life, we are finding out how much of our identity is designed by fear. Is fear the architect of me? — David Richo

The object of their desire, the "essential" core of life, is something called authenticity, and finding the authentic has become the foremost spiritual quest of our time. It is a quest fraught with difficulty, as it takes place at the intersection of some of our culture's most controversial issues, including environmentalism and the market economy, personal identity and the consumer culture, and artistic expression and the meaning of life. — Andrew Potter

If a man has a sense of identity that does not depend on being shored up by someone else, it cannot be eroded by someone else. If a woman has a sense of identity that does not depend on finding that identity in someone else, she cannot lose her identity in someone else. And so we return to the central fact: it is necessary to be. — Jo Coudert

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them
the one, in fact, which is not a mask. — W. H. Auden

Changing our behavior purely for the sake of appearances may seem to conflict with the need to be authentic and consistent, but in many ways it is actually a result of those needs. After all, resolving the tension between standing out from the crowd and becoming isolated requires finding our niche in the world. But what would happen if we weren't accepted in the place where we felt we belonged? For others to see us as a "poseur" or as "delusional" would be painful. Even worse, what if they were right? The social consequences and self-doubt that follow when our self-perceptions conflict with how others see us can be just as destabilizing to our identity as conflicts between our own self-perceptions and actions. — Sheena Iyengar

I think of each movie as a puzzle. The fun is in solving the puzzle: finding a musical identity for the picture, however that can be summed up. — Marco Beltrami

The happy life is impossible without finding an answer to the question "why am I here? What am doing here? — Sunday Adelaja

The human tendency to find their sense of accomplishment within their family, caste, community, region, nation, language and religion will only lead to anarchy for others. In their particular reference framework, this whole quest is about finding one's identity, not eternal peace. The ongoing popular discourse in the world is guided by populist slogans for religion, country and community. It's selfish, misleading and is about one-upmanship. Most often, support is sought for the so called fight for identity in the name of religion and justice. Do — Acharya Balkrishna

Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don't know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterwards. I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don't know what you want because you don't know who you're supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alices in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways. — Olivia Sudjic

For every teenager there are issues that make finding it hard. These girls are totally unique and totally like every teenager everywhere - in the world. They illuminate, beautifully, the universal search for identity that we all have. I hope that people come away from the film with a better understanding of themselves, and compassion for others. — Linda Goldstein Knowlton

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love. — Ellen Glasgow

I guess I just always imagined that I was going to die, like, somehow on top. I was going to, like, go out in some sort of blaze of glory. I never thought about sort of fading into obscurity. And I've worked so hard at having a life, an identity, in obscurity and finding peace with that. — Steve-O

First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you? — Thomas Merton

[Christians] must become, must be known as, the people who don't hold grudges, who don't sulk. We must be the people who know how to say "Sorry," and who know how to respond when other people say it to us. It is remarkable, once more, how difficult this still seems, considering how much time the Christian church has had to think about it and how much energy has been spent on expounding the New Testament, where the advice is all so clear. Perhaps it's because we have tried, if at all, to do it as though it were just a matter of obeying an artificial command
and then, finding it difficult, have stopped trying because nobody else seems to be very good at it either. Perhaps it might be different if we reminded ourselves frequently that we are preparing for life in God's new world, and that the death and resurrection of Jesus, which by baptism constitute our own new identity, offer us both the motivation and the energy to try again in a new way. — N. T. Wright

I have some idea of the pressure of finding your own identity with a famous father. — Michael Douglas

In Russia's case he identifies three strands: the Atlanticists, favouring alignment with the United States and the West (the bandwagoners); the imperialists, who favour the reassertion of Russia's power in opposition to the West (the balancers); and the neo-Slavophiles, sharing the sentiments of the imperialists but who stress the development of the country's Slavic identity.8 According to Zimmerman, the fundamental divide is indeed between Westernisers and Slavophiles, in a reprise of nineteenth-century debates, with the Slavophiles intent on counterbalancing American hegemony and finding an autonomous developmental path.9 — Richard Sakwa

We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart - the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong. — Carson McCullers

When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he's standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can't deny that they're there, he can't for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play. — Tom Stoppard

There's never been a great fight without the writers taking on and finding an identity for it. That's probably what has happened boxing. Writers are not writing about us big boys anymore and I tell you right, however you feel, take something, find it, and use it because American needs something to read about. Not to see on television, but to read about. Let the writers take over. — George Foreman

These masked men were going to bring me to a cleaner place, where things were more sharply distinguished from one another and where I would finally have the space to figure out who I was without other people nudging me all the time into shapes they thought I should have. — Alexandra Kleeman

Instead of wishing for the Field Guide, be glad to live in the beautiful chaos of each of us finding our way into our own gendered menu, our own identity, and our own name for it, which - if you will just love us while we do this complex and fragile part - we will kiss into your mouth with such gratitude when we're through. — S. Bear Bergman

We need to go inward instead of outward, and learn to trust our own inner guide, preserving our identity and finding the answers from within. — Jane Fulton Alt

When you're younger, it's hard because you're finding your identity, and then for 12 hours out of the day, you have to be a different person. So that's a tricky phase - as far as figuring who you are out and then figuring out the people that you're working with. — Hilarie Burton

History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognise that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire. — Peter Ackroyd

Let me say that the path I did take for a brief period of my life was not of reckless drug use, hurting others, but it was a path of quiet rebellion, of a little experimentation of a darker side of my confusion in a confusing world, lost in the midst of finding my identity. — Jennifer Capriati

Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like. — Raquel Cepeda

Well to me growing, up I've had my own psychological war with my parents dying at such a young age. My mother was killed by a drunk driver, then two months later my father drowned. He was out with his friends drinking and on medication for depression, and he didn't come out of the water alive. Growing up with sexual abuse and having to be in gangs and dealing with my own trauma; finding the cultural identity when I was 16, and learning those traditional ways saved me from hurting myself. — Adam Beach

This is why I like Diakopoulos' approach of using technology to answer a need. He identifies four news consumers needs: 1. staying informed; 2. gaining personal identity (through, for example, reinforcing one's values); 3. integrating and interacting socially (finding the basis for conversation); and 4. being entertained. He next defines 10 key journalistic functions: 1. truth 2. independence 3. impartiality 4. public interest 5. watchdogging 6. organizing forums 7. informing 8. storytelling 9. aggregating 10. sensemaking — Jeff Jarvis

The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness; and both these ends are reached by imitation. — Eric Hoffer

To me, the most interesting part of 'True Blood' is that the entire crux of the show is based on identity and finding your true identity. — Marshall Allman

Anyway, there are two tentative solutions for getting rid of selfishness - both involving a stoic casting - off of the thin tenuous little identity which I love and cherish so dearly - and being confident that, once on the other side, I shall never miss my own little ambitions for my conceited self, but shall be content in serving the ambitions of my mate, or of a society, or cause. (Yet I will not, I cannot accept any of those solutions. Why? Stubborn selfish pride. I will not make what is inevitable easier for my-self by the blinding ignorance-is-bliss "losing-and-finding" theory. Oh, no! I will go, eyes open, into my torture, and remain fully cognizant, unwinking, while they cut and stitch and lop off my cherished malignant organs.) So much for selflove: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative - to be disposed of only when desperation sets in. — Sylvia Plath

And keep in mind that the you that makes life worthy of living today won't be the same you that makes life worth living this time next year. Identities aren't meant to be permanent. They're like cars: they take us from one place to another. We work, travel, and seek adventure in them until they break down beyond repair. At that point, living well means finding a new model that better suits us for a new moment. — Kate Bornstein

Post-modern intellectuals have pronounced their historical judgment on America's past, finding it to be morally indefensible. Every great human achievement of the past - whether in philosophy, religion, literature, or the humanities - came to be understood as a kind of exploitation of the powerless. Rather than allowing the past to be viewed in terms of its aspirations and accomplishments, it has been judged by its failures. The living part of the past is understood in terms slavery, racism, and identity politics. Political correctness arose as the practical and necessary means of enforcing this historical judgment. No public defense of past greatness could be allowed to live in the present. Public morality and public policy would come to be understood in terms of the formerly oppressed. — John Marini

Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like an app straining for a song, data science is about finding patterns...to devise methods, structures, even shortcuts to find the signal amidst the noise. We're all looking for our own Parson's code. Something so simple and yet so powerful in a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, but luckily there are a lot of lifetimes out there. And for any problem that data science might face, this book ["Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us About Our Offline Selves"] has been my way to say: I like our odds. — Christian Rudder

Rosie [her teenage daughter] had a secret life now, was putting together her own tribe, finding her identity there, and it was great to see, and it hurt like hell. — Anne Lamott

Everything is music for the born musician. — Romain Rolland

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
this brokenness inside me might start healing.
Out here its like I'm someone else,
I thought that maybe I could find myself
if I could just come in I swear I'll leave.
Won't take nothing but a memory
from the house that built me. — Miranda Lambert

Nothing in the Bible encourages us to give sex the exalted status it has in our culture, as if finding our purpose, our identity, and our fulfillment all rest with what we can or cannot do with our private parts. — Kevin DeYoung

Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec'd his freedom."
Consider, then, the full measure of my sadness, reading this inscription; not merely for Hosiah Lister, but for all of us, consider the dear cost of liberty in a world so hostile, so teeming with enemies and opportunists, that one could not become free without casting aside all casualty, all choice, all will, all identity; finding freedom only in the spacious blankness of unbeing, the wide plains of nonentity, infinite and still. — M T Anderson