Quotes About Identity

When you spend too much time concentrating on everyone else's perception of you, or who everyone else wants you to be, you eventually forget who you really are. So don't fear the judgments of others; you know in your heart who you are and whats true to you.

Life is not about who you once were, it is about who you are right now, and the person you have the potential to be.

Actually to recognise someone, more still, to identify him you have been unable to recognise, is to think two contradictory things under a single denomination, it is the same as saying that he who was here, the being we recall, is here no longer and that he who is here is one we never knew, that means piercing a mystery almost as troubling as that of death of which it is indeed the preface and the herald.

You will find the Comte de Crisenoy," whom I had never lost, for the simple reason that I did not know him.

But now, in spite of her smiles and greetings, I failed to recognise her in a lady whose features had so gone to pieces that the outline of her face could not be restored. What had happened was that for three years she had been taking cocaine and other drugs. Her eyes deeply and darkly rimmed were haggard, her mouth had a strange twitch. She had, it seems, got up for this reception though she was in the habit of remaining in bed or on a sofa for months.

The question isn't, as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to be one of them or not to be one of them. You're one, my uncle Charlus is one. What d'you expect? I've never liked all that, it's not my fault.

But really Legrandin had no need to remind people so often that he belonged to another planet when all his uncontrollable impulses of anger or affability were governed by the desire to occupy a good position on this one.

It was now so much a part of him, that it could not have been torn from him without destroying him almost entirely: as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable.

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.

The person that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man whom I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

And so these women, either misunderstanding or else scorning the influence that publicity has today acquired, are fashionable for the Queen of Spain, but unrecognized by the crowd, because the first knows and the second do not know who they are.

notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres. Même l'acte si simple que nous appelons « voir une personne que nous connaissons » est en partie un acte intellectuel

That art had become a poor and pitiable thing. It was no longer inhabited by a deep-rooted soul.

No doubt these geographical regions and the historic past that injected forest glades and Gothic steeples into their names had to a certain extent shaped their faces, their minds, and their prejudices, but had survived in them only as does the cause in the effect—that is, as something that can be unearthed by the intelligence but in no way perceived by the imagination.

in my spell of uncertainty as to where I was...

every social class has its own pathology...

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Possibly they knew better than I did that the Duchesse de Guise was Princess of Cleves, of Orléans, of Porcien, and so forth, but long before they knew all these names, they had known the Duchesse de Guise's face, which was subsequently what this name reflected back to them. I had begun with the fairy, even if she was soon fated to perish; they had begun with the woman herself.

There are far fewer ideas than men, therefore all men with similar ideas are alike. As

Marcel Proust

Ni siquiera desde el punto de vista de las cosas más insignificantes de la vida somos los hombres un todo materialmente constituido, idéntico para todos, y del que cualquiera puede enterarse como de un pliego de condiciones o de un testamento. Nuestra personalidad social es una creación del pensamiento de los demás.

Reality is formed only by memory.