Quotes About Identity

We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

God oft-times doesn't give a lot of answers but just keeps telling us who we are. God just keeps inviting us into that place where love is alive and where God is in love.

What we call Original Sin in Genesis perhaps could, in a sense, be better called Original Shame, because Adam and Eve describe themselves as feeling naked. Some of the first words of God to these newly created people are, "Who told you that you were naked?" (Genesis 3:11). Next, in a lovely maternal image, God as seamstress sews leather garments for them (3:21). The first thing God does after creation itself is cover the shame of these new creatures.

Hate can be helpful to certain causes. It unites a group quickly, it gives a person identity—even if it is a negative one—and, most of all, it takes away doubt and all free-floating anxiety. It gives us a place to stand that feels superior and in control. Hate settles the dust and ambiguity that none of us like. Hate is much more common, and more immediately effective, than love. Hate, as we will sadly see below, makes the world go 'round.

Francis's all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer.

Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. Your False Self is just who you think you are—but thinking doesn't make it so.

Men as a class appear to be at risk, maybe even at high risk.

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves.

Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you.

Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it. So

They look like the oppressors, but have no doubt they are really the oppressed.

Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, "If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted."7

The self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives at the Gospel. The self that begins is the self that we think ourselves to be, the superior self we want to be. This is the self that dies along the way— until 'no one' is left. This is the true self that all Great Religion talks about, the self bigger than death yet born of death, a different self than the private I, a self transformed by God and transformed in God.

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves. The very fact that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes one seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.

Without a transcendent connection, each of us is stuck in his own little psyche, struggling to create meaning and produce an identity all by himself. When we inevitably fail at this-because we can't do it alone-we suffer shame and self-defeat. Or we try to pretend that our small universe of country, ethnicity, team, or denomination is actually the center of the world.

It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what Mom and Dad always wanted them to be and do.

I finally had to be either Roman or catholic, and I continue to choose the catholic end of that spectrum.

All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is driving and guiding us forward. We are all en Cristo, willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously.

My personal belief is that Jesus's own human mind knew his full divine identity only after his resurrection. He had to live his life with the same faith that we must live, and also "grow in wisdom, age, and grace" (Luke 2:40), just as we do.

Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.

All of us, without exception, are living inside of a common identity, already in place, that is driving and guiding us forward. Paul calls this bigger Divine identity the "mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made en Cristo from the very beginning" (Ephesians 1:9).