2,417 Quotes About Identity

A strict self-image demonstrates a predisposition to maintain a rigid explanation and definition of a person. Our self-image becomes self-perpetuating because of the tendency of the mind to exhibit partiality regarding what we attend to and a preference in what we are prepared to accept as true about the world and ourselves.

Wearing a mask can thus be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask that in what we assume to be our "real self.

Be like the flower, content with its nature.

When I strip away my dreams, what i imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven't aid, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I've made for myself that I don't follow--I see that I've done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I.

How could I castrate my mind--neuter it!--and build up a resistance to know what was mine from what was everyone else's, and finally be in the world in my own way? That endless capacity for empathy--which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires!

My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.

My royal daughter," Ma had singsonged, "none of us is just one thing. Life is a process of learning to recognize our many faces.

She sang lead, and I belted out the background voice that just repeated, "You're everything everything everything," and I felt like I was. You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also you.

We are not complete in ourselves without others, without a world to complement our self-conception—and were we to become so complete, we could not bear it! The fullness of ourselves would break us. We burn. The point of Figment/Fragment/Filament”—claws spread to encompass the whole warehouse space—“is to reflect, refract the beauty of physical form, the glorious futility of our quest for complete knowledge, mastery, or independence.