Identical Person Quotes & Sayings

Knowing what a person believes on a certain subject is not identical to knowing how that person thinks. — Sam Harris

Master Stanley used to tell me that what I was doing was nowhere near as important as the place within myself from where I was doing it. For example, a person could be teaching others out of a selfless motive, or out of a desire for power or glory: the former had a positive impact on the world, whereas the latter had a negative impact, even though the same identical teaching may have been imparted. "It's the spirit that's important," he would say. "It's even more important than the act. Going to work in a gas station and providing for your family out of love is more important than creating a mighty religious work out of a desire for glory or power. — Thom Hartmann

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names - Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be. — F Scott Fitzgerald

She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song. The various beer cans had different decorations but all contained the identical weak low-end brew. It occurred to her to drive to Grand Rapids and buy some actual wine. It occurred to her to drive back to the house without buying anything at all. But then where would she be? A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person. — Jonathan Franzen

They were different colors: the right one blue, the left green. And her face in the light of the candle on the table startled me at first, just as it had in the icy night air. After seeing it on the street, I was afraid I had only imagined it: a still, luminous face with a silvery sheen. Finely hewn, with a long, straight nose and a wide mouth, it was nearly identical to another face, which I had photographed years before. Not on a person, bu on the fragment of a frieze I found in some ruins near Verona, The frieze, which depicted a band of musicians, had once been shadowed beneath a cornice high on the temple of Mercury, god of magic. Belonging to one of the musicians, it was a riveting face - like a puzzle that could not be solved - which I had never found, or expected to find, on a living woman. — Nicholas Christopher

Sometimes as I'm drifting toward sleep, in the beginnings of that dissolution, I wonder where I am, when this is, and realize that at these moments I could be anywhere, anytime, for all I know: eight and napping in the trailer, my broken arm in a cast, or thirteen at night clutching a pillow to my neck, or twenty in the arms of my boyfriend, or twenty-seven in the arms of my husband, or thirty-three next to my imaginary daughter; at every place in the whole spinning shape that is my life, when I am falling asleep, I am the same person, the identical awareness, the same fuzzball of mind, the same muck of nerves, all along the line. I forage through my life and everywhere - there, there, and there - it is only me in it, the very same me, the same harmless lump, the same soggy weirdo, the same sleeping, breathing bun. — Lorrie Moore

Suppose that 'Unsolved Mysteries' called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people - like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. — Nathan Myhrvold

Despite the personalization of life's events, all people largely experience the same general transformative stages of life and eventually we all encounter a row of similar tragedies. We do not experience identical lives or exemplify replicable personalities. Every person is a receptacle whom is capable of experiencing the full gamut of the entire human condition. Our lives act as a period of apprenticeship, which we devote laboring to discover the truths that we can live by. — Kilroy J. Oldster

What happens in a strike happens not to one person alone ... It is a crisis with meaning and potency for all and prophetic of a future. The elements in crisis are the same, there is a fermentation that is identical. The elements are these: a body of men, women and children, hungry; an organization of feudal employers out to break the back of unionization; and the government Labor Board sent to "negotiate" between this hunger and this greed. — Meridel Le Sueur

Standardisation of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism for achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardised, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic - kindness to animals, for instance - but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition. — Doris Lessing

Books and newspapers assume a "common reader" that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show a remarkable consistency — Edward Hirsch

I think the mysterious pull that draws you to another person is identical to the one that moves our eyes upward to the stars. — Lang Leav

Every person under your supervision is different. They're all different. They're identical in most ways, but not in all ways. You have to study and analyze every individual under your supervision and try to work with them in a way that will be most productive. — John Wooden

Tedium and boredom are related, but not identical. Tedium comes from a person lacking an ideology to live by; the dulling fear fomented in the soul after confronting the paucity of life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Liberation does not concern the person, for liberation is freedom from the person. Basically the disciple and teacher are identical. Both are the timeless axis of all action and preception. The only difference is that one 'knows' himself for what he is while the other does not. The idea of being a person, an ego, is nothing other than an image held together by memory. — Jean Klein

In fact, like other personality traits, personal happiness appears to be strongly influenced by our genes. Studies of identical and fraternal twins show that identical twins are significantly more likely to exhibit the same level of happiness than are fraternal twins or other siblings. Behavior geneticists have used these studies to estimate just how much genes matter, and their best guess is that long-term happiness depends 50 percent on a person's genetic set point, 10 percent on their circumstances (e.g., where they live, how rich they are, how healthy they are), and 40 percent on what they choose to think and do.31 — Nicholas A. Christakis

Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being - and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One. — Erich Fromm

The students rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent, which made sense since "their" accomplishments were completely identical. Yet while students respected both Heidi and Howard, Howard came across as a more appealing colleague. Heidi, on the other hand, was seen as selfish and not "the type of person you would want to hire or work for. — Sheryl Sandberg

It is clear that I must find my other half. But is it a he or a she? What does this person look like? Identical to me? Or somehow complementary? Does my other half have what I don't? Did he get the looks? The luck? The love? Were we really separated forceably or did he just run off with the good stuff? Or did I? Will this person embarrass me? What about sex? Is that how we put ourselves back together again? Or can two people actually become one again? — John Cameron Mitchell

Minnows and catfish can recognize each member of their own species by his particular, person-specific odor. It is hard to imagine a solitary, independent, existentialist minnow, recognizable for himself alone; minnows in a school behave like interchangeable, identical parts of an organism. But there it is. — Lewis Thomas

Mitochondrial DNA is completely separate from a person's regular DNA. It's a bit of genetic material residing in the mitochondria of every cell in the body, and it is inherited unchanged from generation to generation, through the female line. That means all the descendants - male and female - of a particular woman will have identical mitochondrial DNA, which we call mtDNA. This kind of DNA is extremely useful in forensic work, and separate databases are kept of it. — Douglas Preston

For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a representative image that really hovers before him in place of a concept. For him, the character is not a whole laboriously assembled from individual traits, but a person, insistently living before his eyes, distinguished from the otherwise identical vision of the painter by his continuous life and action. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Human life is not some sort of race or game in which each person should start from an identical mark. It is an attempt by each man to be as happy as possible. And each person could not begin from the same point, for the world has not just come into being; it is diverse and infinitely varied in its parts. The mere fact that one individual is necessarily born in a different place from someone else immediately insures that his inherited opportunity cannot be the same as his neighbor's. — Murray Rothbard

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. — Marcel Proust

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self. — Erich Fromm

The nurse pointed out that identical twins were already clones in a sense, and Mother Emmanuel suggested that the soul to worry about belonged to the person who would have himself cloned at great expense when so many unwanted children were going hungry. — Mark Salzman

Human beings have evolved to be extremely good at identifying other individual humans. The race's survival depends on it. A guard lets the wrong person through the gate, and a whole settlement is wiped out. There are a million ways to tell two human beings apart. Not just appearance, either. Gait, odor, pheromones, speech patterns, dialect, nervous habits... even the way people breathe. Even parents of identical twins have little difficulty telling them apart, despite the fact that they are genetically identical and were raised in exactly the same environment, because of tiny differences in appearance and behavior that accrue as the result of differing experiences. The ability of one human to recognize another by appearance is especially acute when it comes to heterosexual males observing nubile females. There is nothing on Earth men pay more attention to than the appearance of sexually attractive young women. — Robert Kroese

[Cloning] can't make you immortal because clearly the clone is a different person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will be faint consolation to the dead one that the other one is still running around, even though they are genetically identical. So the road to immortality is not through cloning. — Arthur Caplan

While I was fighting, I heard other people speaking in the name of freedom, and the more they defended this unique right, the more enslaved they seemed to be to their parents' wishes, to a marriage in which they had promised to stay with the other person "for the rest of their lives," to the bathroom scales, to their diet, to half-finished projects, to lovers to whom they were incapable of saying "No" or "It's over," to weekends when they were obliged to have lunch with people they didn't even like. Slaves to luxury, to the appearance of luxury, to the appearance of the appearance of luxury. Slaves to a life they had not chosen, but which they had decided to live because someone had managed to convince them that it was all for the best. And so their identical days and nights passed, days and nights in which adventure was just a word in a book or an image on the television that was always on, and whenever a door opened, they would say: "I'm not interested. I'm not in the mood. — Paulo Coelho

The curve of imagination, the curve of brilliance and the curve of sanity are identical curves or at least similar curves ... The more imagination a person has, why, the more intelligence, the more knowingness he has and the saner he's going to be. — L. Ron Hubbard

Can I freely permit this staff member or my son or my daughter to become a separate person with ideas, purposes, and values which may not be identical with my own? — Carl R. Rogers

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. — Marcel Proust

What you do and what you are gradually become the same thing, and are identical when you die. And what you have done to another person becomes a part of your substance as surely as a fruit you have eaten. — Patricia Storace

Ian's sense of right and wrong overwhelms me.
Not a single other person ... I know
possesses such an unshakable sense of morality.
Its more than unbelievable. It's frightening.
To offer without strings something all men crave,
and be rejected by him is incomprehensible.
Think I'll have to kick Kaeleigh's ass.
Does she have any idea what it means ... to be
so treasured? He has built a pedestal for her so tall
that she is afraid to be lifted atop it, because to fall
would mean certain death. But oh, she would rise
far, far beyond fear. — Ellen Hopkins

And so is another question that Sanderson's experience leads him to discuss: whether the mind is identical with the brain. He mentions a case of a man who died in a New York hospital, and who an autopsy revealed to have no brain, only "half a cupful of dirty water". This sounds, admittedly, like another of those absurd stories that are not worth discussing. But in the early 1980s Professor John Lourber of Sheffield University discovered a student with an IQ of 126 whose head was entirely filled with "water". A brain scan showed that the student's brain was merely an outer layer, only one millimetre thick. How can a person function with virtually no brain? Lourber, who specializes in hydrocephalis ("water on the brain") replies that he has come across many cases of perfectly normal people whose heads are filled with 95 per cent of fluid, and that 70 to 90 per cent is actually quite common. — Colin Wilson

A real life, a life that leaves a deposit in the shape of something alive ... It's difficult to say what makes a life a real life ... You could also say it depends on a person being identical with himself. — Max Frisch

A feminist is a person who answers 'yes' to the question 'Are women human?' Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men ... It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience. — Katha Pollitt

What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature? Is it an identical experience regardless of what kind of culture a person lives in, or is it something different according to the degree of individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something - and if so, of what? What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat? — Erich Fromm

S death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists ... A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer's day while I cannot? — Rebecca Goldstein

Vitality, understood both somatically and mentally, is itself the medium that contains a gradient between more and less. It therefore contains the vertical component that guides ascents within itself, and has no need of additional external or metaphysical attractors. That God is supposedly dead is irrelevant in this context. With or without God, each person will only get as far as their form carries them.
Naturally 'God', during the time of his effective cultural representation, was the most convincing attractor for those forms of life and practice which strove 'towards Him' - and this towards-Him was identical to 'upwards'. Nietzsche's concern to preserve vertical tension after the death of God proves how seriously he took his task as the 'last metaphysician', without overlooking the comical aspect of his mission. He had found his great role as a witness to the vertical dimension without God. — Peter Sloterdijk