Quotes About Identity

You have to learn to follow your heart. You can't let other people pressure you into being something that you're not. If you want God's favor in your life, you must be the person He made you to be, not the person your boss wants you to be, not even the person your parents or your husband wants you to be. You can't let outside expectations keep you from following your own heart.

You may think there is a lot wrong with you, but there is also a lot right with you.

It's vital that you accept yourself and learn to be happy with who God made you to be. If you want to truly enjoy your life, you must be at peace with yourself.

what people thought of him, then he was no longer a servant of Christ (Galatians 1:10).

85 percent of American converts to Islam are African-American.

Look in the mirror and decide once and for all: Am I biological or mechanical? Is my deepest essence a machine or not?

Pretend that you're a clever shepherd girl, and you're just dressed up in pretty clothes, and you're trying to make everybody believe that you're a spoiled, empty-headed little princess. So no one guesses that under your clothes you're a brave shepherd girl who climbs trees and chases away wolves with your staff.

Ruumiini oli pettänyt minut ja alkanut vastoin tahtoani muuttaa minua prinsessaksi.

I was becoming acutely aware […] that Negroes rarely were allowed to be experts about themselves; others always knew more, wrote or said more, or at least what they said or wrote got around more and certainly was given more credence.

They shall not be expected to acknowledge us until we have acknowledged ourselves.

I never saw the face of Cobbett...I should not know him if I met him in my porridge dish.

One's relationship with money is lifelong, it colors one's sense of identity, it shapes one's attitude to other people, it connects and splits generations; money is the arena in which greed and generosity are played out, in which wisdom is exercised and folly committed. Freedom, desire, power, status, work, possession: these huge ideas that rule life are enacted, almost always, in and around money.

Value your personal difference. If you try pleasing your friends, you'll lose your authentic self.

How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you.

as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.

The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.

We erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves - idealised, you know, but still recognisable - and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness.

I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I'm startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.

Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.

I am like the Census," he said, "broken down by age, sex and religion.

There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it

Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.