Quotes About Selfhood

I'm not Bill Gates. And I'm not Ted Turner.

it was a person's choices that defined his or her identity and not the other way around.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

They don't own me. If I'm gonna die, I wanna still be me.

I don't want to be remembered as 'the son of Bruce Lee'.

When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle you.' 'I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you'd be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn't no way I'd ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.

I have my own identity ... The whole Michael thing does drive me nuts sometimes because people won't leave it alone. He's bald, I have hair. He's almost 40, I'm 22. Seriously though, I wish people would let it be and let me just be Kobe.

The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual's right to define his or her own existence. All these things play into legitimizing and strengthening those groups that can define themselves in such terms. They capture, one might say, the spirit of the age.

Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification.

If the world is a swarm of ephemeral quanta of space and matter, a great jigsaw puzzle of space and elementary particles, then what are we? Do we also consist only of quanta and particles? If so, then from where do we get that sense of individual existence and unique selfhood to which we can all testify? And what then are our values, our dreams, our emotions, our individual knowledge? What are we, in this boundless and glowing world?

There is no old age. There is, as there always was, just you.

I am not a number, I am a free man!

If one is free at heart, no man-made chains can bind one to servitude.

A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.

I'm not a brand name, I'm a person.

Since for most of her life my mother's mind, belonging first to her father and then to her husband, had not been hers to make up, she was finding it difficult to come to a decision

Koschei, Koschei," she whispered. "What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one; I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you.

Volk und Knecht und Ãœberwinder Sie gestehen, zu jeder Zeit, Hoechtes Glueck der Erdenkinder Sei nur die Personlichkeit.

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him--he may be forced to--but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.

Men are egotists, and not all tolerant of one man's selfhood; they do not always deem the amities elective.

Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it's mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.

I am not... your Sakura