Quotes About Identity

In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

What is society but an individual? [...] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.

Disqualified as a human beings. I had now ceased utterly to be a human beings.

From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?

Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy.

Good night. I'm Cinderella without her prince. Do you know where to find me in Tokyo? You won't see me again.

The more I think of it, the less I understand. All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it?— I don't know.

I have frantically played the clown in order to distangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result.

What is society but an individual?

Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don't know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.

There's something about you that smells a little of a Christian priest. I find it offensive.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is the individual.

Just because a person has a title doesn't make him an aristocrat. Some people are great aristocrats who have no other title than the one that nature has bestowed on them, and others like us, who have nothing but titles, are closer to being pariahs than aristocrats.

Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.

Most people would take me for over forty.

Learning is a another name of vanity, It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.

Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves?

I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

Before anyone realized it, I had become an accomplished clown

I didn't know whether it was better to maintain a fierce distinction between yourself and your acquaintances in society in order to deal with and respond properly to things in a pleasant manner, or rather never to hide yourself, to remain true to yourself always, even if they say bad things about you

This year I am twenty-seven. My hair has become much greyer. Most people would take me for over forty.

All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest.

Masks in one layer after another—as many as ten or twenty—had fastened themselves upon me, and I could no longer tell how sad any one of them really was.