95 Quotes About Self-identity

for the first timeher mirror does not look like a closet

The secret of true freedom lies in freedom from self-identity.

Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.

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.

The human mind’s innate ability to imagine and create ensures that we never remain stalled out in who we are. We constantly seek to amend our circumference and circumstances, craft and redraft our emotional, social, political, economic, and artistic being.

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.

[M]y discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

What we ‘need’ tells us who we are. What we ‘want’ tells us who we want to be. Therefore, we pursue we what we ‘want’ because we don’t want to face who we are.