Self Identity Quotes & Sayings

The only antidote to the unnerving effects of such incoherence is integrity. People and organizations with integrity are wholly themselves. No aspect of self stands different or apart. At their center is clarity, not conflict. When they go inside to find themselves, there is only one self there. — Margaret Wheatley

A willingness to let go of an old self and allow creative thoughts to remake a person into a better version of oneself requires an act of courage. — Kilroy J. Oldster

What would you say to yourself if you could actually meet a younger you? — Doug Dillon

The idea that somehow "no self, no problem"- I don't exist because I don't have a self- would be a mistaken understanding. However, the selflessness teaching is not that hard to understand. What it means is a type of self that people feel they have, like a fixed, unchanging identity. Either they know they have it, or for some, they feel they need to seek it, and possibly have an experience where they feel like they found something. That type of fixed, unchanging, essential self, or absolute self doesn't exist. That's what "no self" means. — Robert Thurman

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes. — James Baldwin

It's better to risk being disliked for living your truth than to be loved for what you are pretending to be. — Dawn Gluskin

Haven't you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on a "narrative" in return? Haven't we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of "insanity"? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else's visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares? — Haruki Murakami

Are you what others say and think you are? Or are you who you are regardless of what others say and think? — Richelle E. Goodrich

Hide in the morrow. No one will look for you there. — Ljupka Cvetanova

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves. — Douglas Coupland

If he could just have one more chance, he'd act like the man he'd always believed himself to be. — Liane Moriarty

To ask who we are represents a primary reflex in human consciousness. Every person seeks to understand him or herself and reach a verifiable and cohesive image of his or her own identity. — Kilroy J. Oldster

When I turn my mind's eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things ... — Rene Descartes

Too commonly sex does not have the dignity of a sacramental event because sex is thought to be the means of the search for self rather than the expression and communication of one who has already found himself, and is free from resort to sex in the frantic pursuit of his own identity. — William Stringfellow

Whenever you feel compelled to put others first at the expense of yourself, you are denying your own reality, your own identity. — David Stafford

Time alone helps us to remember who we are. — Fennel Hudson

That, of course, depends entirely on who you mean by 'they'. It's a very vague term. Who is or are 'they'? Is there such a thing, are there such persons as 'they'? We don't know.

But I can tell you this. If the most popular explanation of 'they' is accepted, then these people work in very close, self-contained cells. They do that for their own security.

~Jessop — Agatha Christie

The most destructive thing we can possibly do in life is to make another person doubt his worth and identity as a child of God. The very most productive thing we can do is to help ourselves and others realize that as children of God, our worth is infinite. — Toni Sorenson

If you think you can stand to know what you're made of, try kneeling before God. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Bill read in a biology book about how cells replace themselves over the years; how bodies died and were remade out of interchangeable pieces. It depressed him how foreign his younger self looked to him now, how his body had stolen the identity of this happy dead kid, and with his own life, had made a complete mess of it — Don Hertzfeldt

One reason that challenge brings happiness is that it allows you to expand your self - definition. You become larger. Suddenly you can do yoga or make homemade beer or speak a decent amount of Spanish. Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened. — Gretchen Rubin

To know our refuse is to know ourselves. We mark our own trail from past to present with what we've used and consumed, fondled, rejected, outgrown. — Jane Avrich

The most disgusting in the world is being unaware of who we are — Sunday Adelaja

Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression. — Sarah Churchwell

We are dominated by everything with which our self is identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves. The normal mistake we all make is to identify ourselves with some content of consciousness rather than with consciousness itself. Some people get their identity from their feelings, others from their thoughts, others from their social roles. But this identification with a part of the personality destroys the freedom which comes from the experience of the pure "I". — Roberto Assagioli

Those who have chosen the path of least resistance in life, who cannot bear to bring themselves to make a stern value-judgment in criticism of their own most intimate feelings, achieve what they deserve: not self-understanding but radical self-superficialization, not a discovered but a self-ascribed identity that explains nothing, reveals nothing, means nothing, and ultimately accomplishes nothing culturally or intellectually. — Kenny Smith

The child will leave the nest. The best paint job will crack. The best play will become boring. The best work will grow tedious. The best art will lose meaning. The greatest creation will decay. Behind all this, lies my true self. — Vironika Tugaleva

To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand. — Charles Taylor

I don't believe in influence. I think that in order to be an artist, you have to move. When you stop moving, then you're no longer an artist. And if you move from somebody else's position, you simply cannot know the next step. I think that everyone is on his own line. I think that after you've made one step, the next step reveals itself. I believe that you were born on this line. I don't say that the actual footsteps were marked before you get to them, and I don't say that change isn't possible in your course. But I do believe we unfold out of ourselves, and we do what we are born to do sooner or later, anyway. — Agnes Martin

Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes ... Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism , and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence. — E. O. Wilson

We give ourselves only to relationships and pursuits that build us up and bolster our efforts at self-justification and self-creation. But this also leads us to disdain and look down on those who do not have the same accomplishments or identity-markers — Timothy Keller

By regarding ourselves with kindness, we begin to dissolve the identity of an isolated, deficient self. This creates the grounds for including others in an unconditionally loving heart. — Tara Brach

You are not your thoughts!! This simple yet powerful statement can greatly change the quality of your life. — Dawn Gluskin

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. — Nick Hornby

The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow," [Woolf] writes. "We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friens know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented. (Woolf's Darkness) — Rebecca Solnit

To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity ..lies nothing but unconditional love. — Terry Eagleton

Yet early on in the marriage I found myself
despite all my self-promises
drifting into the role of wife: focusing on the renovations of the apartment, doing silly little domestic things instead of writing, using the wife role as cop-out from my work, my work which had always involved me in so much controversy and which some part of me longed to retreat from ... Even when I was forty-seven, full of my own power, my own identity, something in me wanted to escape from the fray and dwindle into a wife. It seemed to comfy, so safe. — Erica Jong

Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.

At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy.

Was the last face the real one?

No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.) — Milan Kundera

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others - our parents, for instance - and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live. — Charles Taylor

As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. — Audre Lorde

Dissociation, in a general sense, refers to a rigid separation of parts of experiences, including somatic experiences, consciousness, affects, perception, identity, and memory. When there is a structural dissociation, each of the dissociated self-states has at least a rudimentary sense of "I" (Van der Hart et al., 2004). In my view, all of the environmentally based "psychopathology" or problems in living can be seen through this lens. — Elizabeth F. Howell

False self is an identity based on what you have, what you do, and what others think about you. In stark contrast to this is the true self in Christ, which is who we are before God and in God - Christ living in us, as Paul put it to the churches in Galatia — Basil Pennington

Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it. — Stephen Covey

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among. — Alain De Botton

My parents raised me to not ever look at race or color, so it doesn't have a big part in my self-identity. — Robert Griffin III

In these few minutes one gets an overwhelming impression of the absolute identity of Body and Mind, and the fact that our highest functions - consciousness and self - are not entities, self-sufficient, "above" the body, but neuropsychological constructs - processes - dependent on the continuity of bodily experience and its integration. — Oliver Sacks

The power of ignorance can make a powerful man look powerless — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I'd like to say I'm not self-absorbed compared to others, but that's hard to say since I'm far too self-absorbed to pry into others' self-absorption. — Anonymous

What, however, makes culture and ideology attractive? They become attractive when they are seen as rooted in material success and influence. Soft power is power only when it rests on a foundation of hard power. Increases in hard economic and military power produce enhanced self-confidence, arrogance, and belief in the superiority of one's own culture or soft power compared to those of other peoples and greatly increase its attractiveness to other peoples. Decreases in economic and military power lead to self-doubt, crises of identity, and efforts to find in other cultures the keys to economic, military, and political success. — Samuel P. Huntington

The very act of thinking about power in our lives and experiences creates a process of revelation and self-analysis that may even make us look at ourselves in a new light ... thinking about power and its complex manifestations may not simply lead to a better understanding of the abstract complexities of society, but may have an effect on one?s own image and identity. Perhaps a warning label should be placed on the cover ... — Kenneth E. Boulding

Was an antidote to the self-consciousness that consumed me as an eccentric teenager in search of an identity. — Michael J. Fox

A girl should be two things: who and what she wants. — Coco Chanel

I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books. — Beatrice Sparks

Mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence. We are tempted to doubt our innate value precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from, and our relationship to, God. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Everything I touch makes me a little bit more like the thing I'm touching, so I'd better start paying attention to what I'm touching. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else. — K.L. Toth

I thought Oliver was trying hard before, but now I realize it's quite the opposite
he doesn't try, he just is, makes up his mind and doesn't check if it's going to work for his image or come off wrong. Since the rest of us are being so self-aware, his presence seems calculated. No one can possibly be that breezy, saying what he thinks, feeling what he feels. I can see why people don't like him for this very reason
it's so much easier to call him a poser.
Because if he's the real deal, then that makes the rest of us fakes. — Lindsey Leavitt

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it. — John Lahr

While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me. — Raquel Cepeda

The less human you feel, the more human you become. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out. — Gregory Benford

I know genes are a big deal, son, but they're not the be-all and end-all." Rob slowed to a halt at the lights, wishing the dickhead behind would back off. "If they were, you'd be in a seafood salad and I'd be in prison. — Karen Traviss

Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion. — Brennan Manning

The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from Descartes to Rorty;' but also the growth of a rich vocabulary of interiority, an inner realm of thought and feeling to be explored. This frontier of self-exploration has grown, through various spiritual disciplines of self-examination, through Montaigne, the development of the modern novel, the rise of Romanticism, the ethic of authenticity, to the point where we now conceive of ourselves as
having inner depths. — Charles Taylor

The existence of homosexuality, not as a circumstantial matter of passing sexual whim, but as a shared condition and identity, raises the intriguing possibility of homosexual culture, or at least of a minority subculture with sexual identity as its base. At the very least, by sympathetic identification with cultural texts which appeared to be affirmative, homosexual people saw a way to shore up their self-respect in the face of constant moral attack, and they found materials with which to justify themselves not only to each other but also to those who found their very existence, let alone their behaviour, unjustifiable. — Gregory Woods

You are not who you think you are. You are not your fears, your thoughts, or your body. You are not your insecurities, your career, or your memories. You're not what you're criticized for and you're not what you're praised for. You are a boundless wealth of potential. You are everything that's ever been. Don't sell yourself short. Every sunset, every mountain, every river, every passionate crowd, every concert, every drop of rain - that's you. So go find yourself. Go find your strength, find your beauty, find your purpose. Stop crafting your mask. Stop hiding. Stop lying to yourself and letting people lie to you. You're not lacking in anything except awareness. Everything you've ever wanted is already there, awaiting your attention, awaiting your time. — Vironika Tugaleva

Our identity is affected less and less by what we produce and more and more by what we consume. — Pete Sanders

I don't believe everything happens for a reason. But I still search for reasons anyway. It's like I don't want to admit that maybe everything really is totally random ... that people are just molecules in the air, bumping into each other and floating away again.
-p150, NOTES TO SELF — Avery Sawyer

You still have only one self and one identity. However, self, identity and personality are not things, they are not objects, and they certainly are not rigid. Instead, they are biological processes built within the brain from numerous interactive components, step by step, over a period of time. — Antonio Damasio

Every person's story contains chapters of pain and loss, victory and defeat, love and hate, pride and prejudice, courage and fear, faith and self-distrust, charity and kindness, selfishness and jealously. Every person's story also contains folios of hopefulness and truthfulness, deceit and despair, action and change, passion and compassion, excitement and boredom, birth and creation, mutation and defect, generation and preservation, delusions and illusions, imagination and fantasy, bafflement and puzzlement. What makes a person's selfsame story unique is how he or she organizes the pure and impure forces that comprise them, how they respond to internal and external crisis, if they act in a safeguarding and humble manner, or lead a self-seeking and destructive existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

There was a way in which my grandmother's true self was not these guests' business; no one's true self was the business of more than a very small number of family members or close friends. — Curtis Sittenfeld

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure
as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness; he could not see them, but he knew that they were there, gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability he could not see or hear. He was approaching them, he knew; but there was no need to hurry. He could ignore them if he wished; he had all the time there was.
There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been. — John Edward Williams

I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you will not discard your Self, but for Renunciates it's as if they've leaped right off the cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something - but gain something in return. — Haruki Murakami

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world. — Alain De Botton

Awakening is the experience of forgiving the illusion of manifesting, for Identity Is Spirit. Christ comes not into form, but calls you out of the world to recognize your Self as eternal Spirit. — David Hoffmeister

I had rather be a meteor, single, alone.'

Plus Paris itself was noisome. Even with its glittering bridges and orangeries, even if the birthplace of ballet.

'I had rather been a meteor, than a star in a crowd. — Danielle Dutton

One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more proficient. To understand more. — Edward Swift

We therapists often make inaccurate assumptions about people living with DID and DDNOS. They often appear to be "just like us," so we often assume their experience of life reflects our own. But this is profoundly untrue. It results in a communication gap, and, as a consequence, treatment errors. Because the dominant culture is one of persons with a single sense of self, most with multiple "selves" have learned to hide their multiplicity and imitate those who are singletons (that is, have a single, non-fragmented personality). Therapists who do not understand this sometimes describe their clients' alters without acknowledging their dissociation, saying only that they have different "moods." In overlooking dissociation, this description fails to recognize the essential truth of such disorders, and of the alters. It was difficult for me to comprehend what life was like for my first few dissociative clients. — Alison Miller

Enlightenment is beyond self-improvement and spiritual seeking. It is the final resolution of a case of mistaken identity. It is the direct recognition of your eternal nature and the seeing through of who you have falsely believed yourself to be. — Gary Crowley

Mediation wishes to speak of other things. So Mediation will quote from an ancient human book. The Hamburg Manifesto says, "Thalience is an attempt to give nature a voice without that voice being ours in disguise. It is the only way for an artificial intelligence to be grounded in a self-identity that is truly independent of its creator's. — Karl Schroeder

Transformation is something that obsesses me. What is the soul? Is there a difference between something like a soul and something like a self? Is our identity something we construct, or is it organic and natural? There are all kinds of theories. — Christopher Barzak

But I never looked like that!' - How do you know? What is the 'you' you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images. — Roland Barthes

Motherhood is exactly the kind of "special circumstance" that lends itself to memoir. It is a time of transition and sometimes a period of intense identity struggle: Who am I if I spend all day shirtless, trying to nurse a colicky baby? What happened to my former life, my former self? How do I balance my own needs with those of my family? I am drawn to all kinds of motherhood memoirs because I am interested in the different ways that women process the challenges and joys of motherhood, and how they write about life in general through their mother eyes. — Kate Hopper

The lost self: With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world is wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance - so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly. — Walker Percy

You can start looking for your purpose in life after you have identify who you are — Sunday Adelaja

Identifying someone by his, or her, outward appearance is often the first and most common error in the world — Sunday Adelaja

I have managed to establish an identity that is based on my internal self, and for that I feel tremendously lucky. — David Rakoff

[T]he flower is made of non-flower elements. We can describe the flower as being full of everything. There is nothing that is not present in the flower. We see sunshine, we see the rain, we see clouds, we see the earth, and we also see time and space in the flower.
A flower, like everything else, is made entirely of non-flower elements. The whole cosmos has come together in order to help the flower manifest herself, The flower is full of everything except one thing: a separate self, a separate identity.
The flower cannot be by herself alone. The flower has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud and everything in the cosmos. If we understand being in terms of inter-being, then we are much closer to the truth. Inter-being is not being and it is not non-being. Inter-being means being empty of a separate identity, empty of a separate self, — Thich Nhat Hanh

Meditate but one hour upon the self's nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man, said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor.
Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world's unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything. — Emil Cioran

The crowd, in fact, is composed of individuals; it must therefore be in every man's power to become what he is, an individual. From becoming an individual no one, no one at all, is excluded, except he who excludes himself by becoming a crowd. To become a crowd, to collect a crowd about one, is on the contrary to affirm the distinctions of human life. The most well-meaning person who talks about these distinctions can easily offend an individual. But then it is not the crowd which possesses power, influence, repute, and mastery over men, but it is the invidious distinctions of human life which despotically ignore the single individual as the weak and impotent, which in a temporal and worldly interest ignore the eternal truth- the single individual. — Soren Kierkegaard

What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are. — DaShanne Stokes

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself. — Harvey Fierstein

Self-identity is inextricably bound up with the identity of the surroundings. — Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

Arrogance is born of insecurity. Pride is different. It is born of dignity, self-worth, and self-respect. We all see the world through the prism of our identity. If our self-worth is low, it affects everything we do. The point of life is to contribute to others, but without a certain self-regard, it is sometimes difficult to make breakfast. — Ethan Hawke

The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another. — Alexander Theroux

It's improbable for me to become lost, because I am already self-realized. A blank scene is a portrait of a glass kingdom to me. In order to become lost, one must not be able to realize their own identity, ego, and self. — Lionel Suggs

Our work is not to become unique. We are unique. Our work is to unleash our sense of adventure and to allow the inner whisper that says "come hither" to be reason enough to go. — Vironika Tugaleva

Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you. — Masamune Shirow

If arts and music, precious gifts in themselves, were akin to memory, literature was the self-knowing of the species; the human mind accumulated, a manifest of wisdom and knowledge, self-doubt and awareness, folly and foible, all transmitted through the generations. Books amplified the light of mind, reinforced the soul. — Mark Cantrell