Quotes About Identity

Why did we make up nicknames? Maybe they were easier to remember. Maybe, too, they just made frightening things more familiar, even a little funny in the midst of the seriousness of war.

You are the Hero of your own Story.

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

If you travel far enough, you'll eventually meet yourself.

Marriage] is the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is.

What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?

Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.

Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.

The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths.

Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of the self-generated double monster-the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult.

Don't think of what's being said, but of what's talking. Malice? Ignorance? Pride? Love?   The goal of the hero's journey is yourself, finding yourself.

The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, "always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.

We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared.

La imagen interior del hombre no debe confundirse con su atuendo.

In a wasteland the surface does not represent the actuality of what it is supposed to be representing, and people are living inauthentic lives. "I've never done a thing I wanted to in all my life. I've done as I was told." You know?

The ultimate experience of love is a realization that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwells identity.

You really can't follow a guru. You can't ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life--there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.

The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to to support society.

the ultimate experience of love is a realization that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwell identity: each is both. This realization can expand into a discovery that beneath the multitudinous individualities of the whole surrounding universe--human, animal, vegetable, even mineral--dwells identity; whereupon the love experience becomes cosmic, and the beloved who first opened the vision is magnified as the mirror of creation.

Der Engländer, der sich im Urwald von Nigeria zum Dinner umkleidet, fühlt, daß diese Handlung einen Sinn hat.

Only when that mortal "you" will have erased everything about itself that it cherishes and is holding to, will "you" have come to the brink of an experience of identity with that Being which is no being yet is the Being beyond the nonbeing of all things. Nor is It anything that you have ever known, ever named, or even thought about in this world:

In the West we know the military uniform, clerical collar, medical goatee, and judge's wig. But where people are naked, it is the body itself that must be changed.

Qué soy? ¿Soy la lámpara que transporta la luz, o soy la luz y la lámpara es mi vehículo?