Quotes About Identity

If God had not permitted the people of Jerusalem to be torn asunder and driven them from the land, but had let them keep it after before, no one could convince them that they are not God`s chosen people.

Are we not to call Christ ours because we have not made him but only received him? Again, if we are the makers of things that are called ours, then we must have made our eyes, we must have made our hands, we must have made our feet, unless eyes, hands and feet are not to be called ours.

So also in the gospel (Matt. 16:13, 15) "Who do men say that the Son of Man is? But you (that is, you who are gods), who do you say that I am?

So we are not sinners because we commit this or that sin, but we commit them because we are sinners first.

No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.

The Negro is the child of two cultures - Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures.

[W]hen you first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are), and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro... when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" - then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves.

When the Negro was completely an underdog, he needed white spokesmen. Liberals played their parts in this period exceedingly well.... But now that the Negro has rejected his role as an underdog, he has become more assertive in his search for identity and group solidarity; he wants to speak for himself.

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.

No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.

The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O.

Depuis le début de cette lettre, j'ai réfléchi à la violence. A la tienne, à la violence en général. Tu as réagi radicalement, entièrement, comme l'expression honnête de ce que tu es : un être capable de résister. Je te comprends mieux, d'autant plus que j'identifie cette violence en moi, par exemple, dans ma décision de m'isoler . Je ne frappe pas les gens, je les fais disparaitre

Essere desiderati non è semplice. Non bisogna farsi illusioni: non siamo mai noi a essere desiderati, ma quello che l'altro immagina di noi e, spesso, quello che potrà servirgli a giustificare le proprie scelte esistenziali.

My personality is a luxury that's costing me too dearly.

Ploaia este cuvântul de recunoaÈ™tere printre cei ispitiÈ›i de o oarecare suspendare a lumii. S? spui c? îÈ›i place ploaia înseamn? s? te recunoÈ™ti diferit.

C'est ce que je veux, je veux d'autres tourments, des maux réels, des manifestations physiques d'un comportement précis. La cause de mon mal sera l'alcool ; pas la vérité, l'alcool. Je préfère une maladie qui tient dans les limites d'une bouteille plutôt qu'une maladie immatérielle et toute-puissante sur laquelle je ne peux pas mettre de nom ("Comment je suis devenu stupide", p37)

Without such beliefs and stories, as Carl Jung put it, we would be 'crushed by the sheer awe-fullness of the universe'. In other words, without a story to give us a place in the greater picture, we will become lost or, even worse, think that we are the story.

After having been made a wife to an older man and an attendant to a princess, the identity she chose to retain was the one she had acquired by her own initiative: that of an author.

Food tells you everything about the way people live and who they are.

The long-departed cave lion is more indigenous to the moor than I will ever be.

Only in very special individuals is there a sense of a past continuous self.

The fact that the Nazis constructed "polarized identities for males and females" and did not accept the feminist dogma about men and women being similar in every respect was said to be one of their worst misdeeds.

Always remember that it's the ego that wants to know and identify everything that is taking place and that this desire is an unnecessary distraction from the real work.