Quotes About Identity

mental agency may be more usefully seen as a developing or constructed capacity.

understanding of the self as a mental agent grows out of interpersonal experience, particularly primary-object relationships

According to Damasio, the core self is the foundation of consciousness, and the autobiographical self is its glory

Do not become what you dispise.

Do not become what you despise.

My poetry is who I am down to the core, even though I do not write autobiographical verse. I have built a syntax and a language to understand myself in the world."—Peter Gizzi

It was the love. The name was a code, a cipher for the love you carried with you until you yourself were gone and your remembering was done.

The dream was ennobling but doomed. It was Malcolm's curse to see this before the most of the rest of us; it was the beginning of his sainthood that when black Americans reached that point--when they arrived, that is to say, at their blackness--Malcolm was already there.

Social cohesion was built into language long before Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter - we're tribal by nature. Tribes today aren't the same as tribes thousand of years ago: It isn't just religious tribes or ethnic tribes now: It's sports fans, it's communities, it's geography.

The idea is, we're still a society where we recognize and see and even sometimes seek members of our own tribe, whatever that tribe is. It could be ethnic, religious, geographic, political.

Yo soy tú. Tengo los mismos problemas y frustraciones que tú».

Well, maybe I can't draw, but I CAN sign my name

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

You spend your whole life believing that you will always be on the outside or on the borderline. You struggle and struggle, and yet it all seems to be in vain. And then, suddenly, you are allowed inside and lifted up into the light.

Die Ansicht, dass Kinder offen sind, dass ihr inneres Wesen sozusagen pur aus ihnen heraussickert, ist weit verbreitet. Das ist falsch. Niemand hält sich bedeckter als ein Kind, niemand muss es so sehr sein. Als Antwort auf eine Welt, die dauernd mit dem Büchsenöffner ankommt, um nachzuschauen, was es in sich hat, ob es nicht vielleicht gegen eine gängigere Konserve eingetauscht werden sollte.

I saw how pure, in a way, they were – no matter what they had done. Each in their own way they had tried to stay what they were. Not like me, who had never been anything, and so had been trying all my life to be someone else. To come inside. I saw that they understood this, too. That they understood it and that it was okay. That, even so, I mattered, come what may.

Maybe a person can be born to the wrong people," he said. "Maybe a person should have been put somewhere else.

In the long run, you can never be any better than your surroundings. When you are in the company of people who look down upon themselves as though they are animals, you, too, become like an animal. Or worse, because animals do not despise themselves.

I'm wearing a pair of high boots, a red turtleneck sweater, a sealskin coat from Groenlandia, and a skirt from Scottish Corner. I've learned that it's always easier to explain things if you're nicely dressed.

I have lost the sense of how to tackle a believing European.

Any race of people that allows itself to be graded on a scale designed by European science will appear to be a culture of higher primates.

When you are in the company of people who look down upon themselves as though they were animals, you too become like an animal. Or worse, because animals do not despise themselves.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Die Müdigkeit als das Mehr des weniger Ich.