Quotes About Self-definition

My mother was in the kind of late-'60s, early-'70s origins of female emancipation. And she was very much like, 'You're not going to be defined by how you look. It's going to be about who you are and what you do.'

I'm convinced that if we don't define ourselves, other people will do it for us, and inaccurately.

Unless individuals have the power to defy commoditization and define their own lives, their potential is vulnerable to the crushing forces of objectification.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

What is I? It's what you are, not what others make of you.

If we resist the temptation to allow other people to define who we are, then we will gradually be able to let the sun inside our own soul shine forth.

We insist on being Someone, with a capital S. We get security from defining ourselves as worthless or worthy, superior or inferior. We waste precious time exaggerating or romanticizing or belittling ourselves with a complacent surety that yes, that's who we are. We mistake the openness of our being—the inherent wonder and surprise of each moment—for a solid, irrefutable self. Because of this misunderstanding, we suffer.

You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

The very fact that these doctors continuing to be doctors--highly successful ones--despite their errors and their accompanying assaults on their self-definion would itself be a potent lesson to the students and interns. It is possible to hold one's head up after an error, to admit that errors are part and parcel of human existence, even in medicine. It is possible to see the error as an aspect of oneself, not the defining characteristic of oneself.

I'm not a synonym—I'm a proper noun.

Becoming our own person, breaking free from our "ought selves"—the identity molded by important people in our lives—is at the heart of the transition process.7 So is ridding ourselves of an unhealthy overidentification with the organizations that employ us, a harder-to-recognize but equally problematic self-definition.

I think the world would be a lot better off if more people were to define themselves in terms of their own standards and values and not what other people said or thought about them.

Si l'on ne se définit qu'en s'opposant, j'étais l'indéfini en chair et en os; si l'amour et la haine sont l'avers et le revers de la même médaille, je n'aimais rien ni personne. C'était bien fait: on ne peut pas demander à la fois de haïr et de plaire. Ni de plaire et d'aimer.

Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.

Values aren't buses, she said shortly. They're not supposed to get you anywhere. They're supposed to define who you are. And I'd rather be touchy-feely than morally bankrupt.

How good I would feel if I could be something that called itself neither man nor woman.

Als Leitwissenschaft für eine lebensfähige und lebenswerte menschliche Zukunft kommt mithin nur eine als Humanwissenschaft verstandene Geistes-, Kultur-und Sozialwissenschaft in Frage, die zwar vom Erkenntnis- und Erfahrungsraum der Naturwissenschaften ausgeht, sich jedoch nicht als deren bloßes Anhängsel versteht, sondern vielmehr auf die Selbstdefinitions- und -sublimationsmacht des Menschen als eines Geist-und Sozialwesens vertraut.

The way you see yourself is important, you see. It's as if you carve yourself out of your own interpretation. And so I became the name I was called.

I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.

The world loves stupid labels. I wish we got to choose our own.

I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else.

I am not a lobbyist. I am not a political activist. I am not a leader, as far as I'm concerned.