Quotes About Identity

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

Reputation is what others perceive you as being, and their opinion may be right or wrong. Character, however, is what you really are, and nobody knows that but you.

Reputation is what others perceive you as being, and their opinion may be right or wrong. Character, however, is what you really are, and nobody truly knows that but you. But you are what matters most.

You must know who you are and be true to who you are if you are going to be who you can and should become.

Let me tell you, Mr. teacher when you say you'll make me right, in five hundred years of fighting not one Indian turned white

Well, I'd love to wear a rainbow everyday and tell the world that everything's okay / But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back / 'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black.

My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story.

I am doing things that are true to me. The only thing I have a problem with is being labeled.

With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying.

They stick you with those names, those labels -- 'rebel' or whatever; whatever they like to use. Because they need a label; they need a name. They need something to put the price tag on the back of.

Genetically, I'm pure Greek. Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I'm a member of the black community.

For the last twenty minutes, having something to do, he had become himself again, had come to earth from that unsafe country of the brain

Die anderen Kaninchen hüpften herum und schrien Hurra und umarmten sich. He Duda, du bist ein Held!, riefen sie. Wie komisch, überlegte He Duda. Ich dachte, ich wäre ein Kaninchen.

He is between worlds, this boy. Between the river and the town, between the hogshead and the house, between the taint of his mother and the stain of his pap. He knows some things that he can never say, not even to himself.

Shall I tell you a joke about languages? Abulfaz asked. A joke. Yes, okay. What do you call a Russian who speaks four languages? I don't know. A Zionist. What about a Russian who speaks three languages? I don't know. A spy. And two? ... No? A nationalist. And only one? ... An inter-nationalist.

Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.

That sentence is: "Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine." In other words, no attachments—especially to fixed ideas of yourself and who you are.

If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are.

It is a hard message to swallow at first blush because it brings into question everything that we think we are, which for the most part seems to come from what we identify with, our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, our relationships, our values, our work, our expectations of what is "supposed" to happen and how things are "supposed" to work out for me in order for me to be happy, our stories of where we came from and where we are going and of who we are.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession…. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Self-Reliance

if you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and letting it flow out of you unimpeded.

The power of mindfulness is the power to examine those self-identifications and their consequences and the power to examine the views and perspectives we adopt so reflexively and automatically and then proceed to think are us.

If you let yourself be blown to and fro, you lose touch with your root. If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are. LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching

When we identify ourselves with a permanent, solid "self," it is a delusion of consciousness, a form of self-imprisonment, according to Einstein. Elsewhere he wrote that "the true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.