Quotes About Identity

It wasn't just hostility I felt around my mother, it was inadequacy. I had loved my early childhood with her. We'd spent long hours playing beauty parlor and teay party, baking holiday cookies.

True freedom comes as we discover and accept the person God created us to be. It grows as we follow the teachings our Creator gave to ensure freedom on the part of those who chose to obey those teachings.

We insist on being Someone, with a capital S. We get security from defining ourselves as worthless or worthy, superior or inferior. We waste precious time exaggerating or romanticizing or belittling ourselves with a complacent surety that yes, that's who we are. We mistake the openness of our being—the inherent wonder and surprise of each moment—for a solid, irrefutable self. Because of this misunderstanding, we suffer.

In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure who we are, or who anyone else is, either.

Consciously or unconsciously, we carry around concepts of "us" and "them," "right" and "wrong," "worthy" and "unworthy." In this framework, there's not much room for a middle ground; everything is at one pole or another. When groups of people or whole nations get together around these concepts, they can become hugely magnified, which may result in large-scale suffering: discrimination, oppression, war.

The root of these fundamentalist tendencies, these dogmatic tendencies, is a fixed identity—a fixed view we have of ourselves as good or bad, worthy or unworthy, this or that. With a fixed identity, we have to busy ourselves with trying to rearrange reality, because reality doesn't always conform to our view.

The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.

The futility of samsara. Samsara is preferring death to life. It comes from always trying to create safety zones. We get stuck here because we cling to a funny little identity that gives us some kind of security, painful though it may be. The fourth reminder is to remember the futility of this strategy.

We're not trying to be something we aren't; rather, we're rediscovering, reconnecting with who we are.

In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are, or who anyone else is, either. Every moment is unique, unknown, completely fresh.

egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness

We suffer... because of three tragic misunderstandings. First, we expect that what is always in the process of change should be graspable and predictable... Second, we proceed as if we are separate from everything else, as if we are a fixed identity, when our true situation is egoless... Third, we look for happiness in all the wrong places. The Buddha called this habit "mistaking suffering for happiness.

There are four maras. The first mara is called devaputra mara. It has to do with seeking pleasure. The second one, called skandha mara, has to do with how we always try to re-create ourselves, try to get some ground back, try to be who we think we are. The third mara is called klesha mara. It has to do with how we use our emotions to keep ourselves dumb or asleep. The fourth one, yama mara, has to do with the fear of death.

When we're thinking that we're competent or that we're hopeless—what are we basing it on? On this fleeting moment? On yesterday's success or failure? We cling to a fixed idea of who we are and it cripples us.

When you hold a fixed idea of yourself, you have to leave out all the parts that you find boring, embarrassing, difficult, or sad. You leave out the emotions you don't want to feel. And then when you do that, when you leave out all those parts, when those parts are not acceptable, then it eats away at you underneath. These unacknowledged parts are like a hum in the background that's eating away at you, and you have to find an escape to get away from that.

I wanted my anger to be valid, and the only way to do that is to be fairly attractive.

Some werewolves are hairy on the inside.

A person's true character lies somewhere until after you might have pressed the wrong button without knowing, then you'll realize that there are dogs in human form.

Why are you so angry?"His question surprised me, and I laughed a little. "This isn't angry, " I smirked. "This is just me. Get used to it.

Never get into an argument with a schizophrenic person and say, Who do you think you are?

Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

The only argument you can make against having Confederate flag as spectacularly shown as it is around the south is the Nazis. I mean, it would be like having the swastika flag...

I never lost an argument and my parents assumed I would be a lawyer. They cast me in that role.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.