32 Quotes About Personal-identity

We tell stories that help define us by unveiling the role we played in our life altering events. We are the product of stories that we tell other people and replay in our minds. We are essentially the character that we can describe through our stories.

In addition to the often unsatisfactory cards dealt to us by heredity...each of us will, throughout our lives, suffer innumerable encounters with disease, injury, emotional trauma, and personal defeat. These stochastic encounters are cumulative, and many of them will even come to shape core parts of our beings. But are our identities inextricably linked to our imperfections, struggles and genetic blemishes?

One of the greatest challenges is to rise above the desire to reinvent who we are and boldly embrace the far loftier challenge of cultivating who we are. For reinventing is to construct what we will never be, while cultivating is to expand who we always were.

Americans with their fixation on individualism might be the nation that flaunts the sharpest sense of self of any people. Ask any American who they are and they will undoubtedly give you a quick synopsis of their personal identity markers including a description of their age, education, occupation, physical skills, mental abilities, values, hobbies, and causes that they support or oppose.

Identity and self-concept flower from common seeds. Conception of self-image stems largely upon what we value and how we wish the world to perceive us. Identity undoubtedly includes what we do, where we are from, and how successful we are. A decided majority of Americans identify themselves by their accomplishments, not by their failures.

We tend to see ourselves through other people’s eyes. We respond to how other people actually treat us as well as to an imaginary audience of people who we presume are judging us. Even living in total isolation of other people, I would construct a sense of personal identity based upon how I thought other people would evaluate me if ‘they could only see me now.

Our remembered experiences and our present day hopes and desires form the spine of each person’s storybook. Knowledge of life and death are traceable facts that shape the contours of each person’s storyboard. Other truths gleaned from living brilliantly fill the pages of each person’s ongoing anthology.

Personal identity is our wellspring of existence.

Who am I? Some answers have their own infinity. With no end. And no beginning.