Identity Quotes - Page 11

• [Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral.

  Coleman Barks

  True Identity, Trying, Vastness

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• It’s all risk. And if it isn’t, it needs to be. The real trick is to find the risk that is right for you, a risk that doesn’t take you so far out of your own identity that it’s not a you that you recognize who’s doing the writing.

  Jim Krusoe

  Real, Writing, Risk

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• Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.

  Timothy Keller

  Sin, Our Relationship, Refusal

  Timothy Keller (2008). “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism”, p.163, Penguin

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• While you cannot resolve what you are, at last you may be nothing.

  Martial

  Lasts, Resolve

  "Epigrams".

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• Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity.

  William Wordsworth

  Son, Cities, Confusion

  William Wordsworth (1994). “The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.698, Wordsworth Editions

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• What thou art, that thou art; that God knoweth thee to be and thou canst be said to be no greater.

  Thomas a Kempis

  Art, Said, Thee

  Thomas a Kempis (1913). “The Imitation of Christ”

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• The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.

  Haim Ginott

  Teenager, Tasks, Personal Identity

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• If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.

  John Cheever

  Sorry, Fog, Essence

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

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• To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name.

  Vachel Lindsay

  Names, Mankind

  Vachel Lindsay, Dennis Camp (1984). “The poetry of Vachel Lindsay: complete & with Lindsay's drawings”, Spoon River Poetry Pr

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• I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.

  James Joyce

  Funny, Humorous, Silly

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• He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends.

  Aesop

  No Friends, One Thing

  Aesop (2013). “Aesop's Fables”, p.25, Lulu Press, Inc

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• What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

  James A. Baldwin

  America, Heroic, Myth

  "For the Love of God — and Country" by Bryan Berghoef, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 27, 2013.

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• Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.

  Alistair Cooke

  Trying, Different, Television

  Alistair Cooke (2014). “America Observed: From the 1940s to the 1980s”, p.179, Open Road Media

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• You see in others who you are.

  Bernard Malamud

  Who You Are

  Bernard Malamud (2017). “Dubin's Lives”, p.146, Random House

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• I'd really love to meet the guy I'm supposed to be. I'd hire him in a second.

  Lee Iacocca

  Guy, Supposed To Be

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• Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

  Thomas Merton

  Memories, Past, True Identity

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.106, New Directions Publishing

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• In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man's identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man's worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are not recognized as fully human.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Pride, Men, Males

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• Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.

  Mary McCarthy

  Men, Doe, Literature

  Mary McCarthy (1961). “On the contrary”, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

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• Our wine is bitter, but it is our wine.

  Jose Marti

  Wine, Bitter

  "US and Cuba keep their distance" by Stephen Wilkinson, www.theguardian.com. August 3, 2009.

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• Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

  Luigi Pirandello

  Lying, Fixed, Certain

  Luigi Pirandello (2016). “Henry IV”, p.34, Luigi Pirandello

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• Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty.

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Knowledge, Men, Forget

  Commencement Speech by Anna Quindlen, www.mtholyoke.edu. 1999.

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• There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Believe, People, Done

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook E 59, 1799.

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• To say a thing simply: I am my history, but the story of my life is always guarded, self-conscious. It is finally the only story we give to someone we love.

  Maureen Howard

  Self, Giving, Stories

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• Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Struggle, Black And White, Purpose

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.141, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

  R. D. Laing

  Real, Self, Consistency

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