Quotes About Self-definition

Accepting reality is what matters. Creating a new reality is what will move you forward in life. Define yourself and give meaning to your life.

Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others. Of all the literary genres, the novel is the genre humain.

Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others.

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there. Senkit nem lehet berakni egy dobozba. Ide hallgass, még egy k? sem ugyanaz, mint bármely másik k?, egyszóval nem is értem, milyen alapon címkéztek fel emberi lényeket üres szavakkal, és hiszitek azt, hogy mindent tudtok.

There is no shape to anything except the shape it has. Every name we give ourselves is wrong.

Without the aid of any man, he will define himself as that which he desires to express. He will discover that his I AM is the virgin conceiving without the aid of man, that all conceptions of himself, when felt, and fixed in consciousness, will be embodied easily as living realities in his world.

Whether the belief pertains to self or another does not matter, for the believer is defined by the sum total of his beliefs or subconscious assumptions.

The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino." - Joe Fox

That's what it says in my IEP, which is more letters. More initials that define who I am.

Name yourself in your heart and know who you are.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

People disconnect from us the moment they begin to define us. They begin to connect with us when they define themselves to us or ask us about ourselves. That's how we get to know them and how they get to know us. It doesn't work the other way around.

Self-definitions of Black womanhood were designed to resist the negative controlling images of Black womanhood advanced by Whites as well as the discriminatory social practices that these controlling images supported.

I didn't ask what I could call you,

They'd scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms—not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating.

We are not the person other people wish we were. We are who we decide to be.

And, she thought uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel like, Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that?