Quotes About Identity

Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off. I am 54 years old, weigh 220 pounds, and look like the chief dispatcher of a long-distance driving concern. I am a registered Democrat. I drink.

Who I am, what I do, and how I do it make a difference." And

WHO ARE YOU?" This is the first question your constituents want you to answer for them. Your leadership journey begins when you set out to find the answer and are able to express it.

As he shook hands with Grant's military secretary Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker's dark features and said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker responded, "We are all Americans."39

At the end of life, each of us must answer the question, Whose story captured my soul?

When we experience God for who He really is, we suddenly see ourselves for who we are.

Who we are is not a question we can ask without seeking to understand the context in which we live. Biblical counselors seek to understand the influences that shape the responses of the human heart.

Paternity is a long way from fatherhood.

Wake up, dude! It's not about who you are. It's all about who God is.

When I embrace God for who He is and I understand who I am—when I know God's place, I can know my place—then things start to fall into place.

God desires for us to be the persons we were created to be: to be simply and purely ourselves, and in this state to love God and to let ourselves be loved by God. It is a double journey, really: finding God means allowing ourselves to be found by God. And finding our true selves means allowing God to find and reveal our true selves to us.

Everyone's true self is a unique creation of God's, and the way to sanctity is to become the unique self that God wishes us to be.

Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. —Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Merton wrote, "Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: the false self." With his typical insight, Merton identifies the false self as the person that we wish to present to the world, and the person we want the whole world to revolve around: Thus

Guilt says, "I did a bad thing." Shame says, "I am a bad person.

But this is about more than just work, a job, or even a career. Vocation may have little to do with one's actual work. For the deepest vocation is to become who you are, to become your "true self," the person whom God created and calls you to be.

Desire is a primary way that God leads people to discover who they are and what they are meant to do.

Whether we are rich or poor, young or old, man or woman, straight or gay: all of us are called to our own brand of personal holiness.

There I was, "striving to be something I would never want to be.

God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.

I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn't matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.

Whatever you is, Onion," he said, "be it full.

It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can't be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free? That pressed on my heart like a vise right then. Just mashed me down.