Self Identity Quotes

• You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.

  Amy Tan

  Thinking, Self, Differences

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Identity, Asking, Dare

  "Discourse on Inequality". Book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754.

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• The more isolated and disconnected we are, the more shattered and distorted our self-identity. We are not healthy when we are alone. We find ourselves when we connect to others. Without community we don't know who we are... When we live outside of healthy community, we not only lose others. We lose ourselves...Who we understand ourselves to be is dramatically affected for better or worse by those we hold closest to us.

  Erwin McManus

  Self, Community, Healthy

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• Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

  Alan Watts

  Self Esteem, Humor, Deep Thought

  Life Magazine, April 21, 1961.

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• The narrative that each person tells herself and others is a big part of how we construct our self-identities. It's one of the most important ways that we make sense of our past and present and understand our hopes for the future.

  Peg O'Connor

  Past, Self, Identity

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.

  Esmeralda Santiago

  Romantic, Famous Love, Best Love

  Esmeralda Santiago (2006). “When I was Puerto Rican”, p.243, Da Capo Press

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• There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.

  Pearl Bailey

  Inspirational, Life, Acceptance

  Pearl Bailey (1969). “The raw Pearl”, Pocket

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• Who has deceived thee as oft as thyself.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Wise, Wisdom, Identity

  Benjamin Franklin (1904). “The Works of Benjamin Franklin: Including the Private as Well as the Official and Scientific Correspondence Together with the Unmutilated and Correct Version of the Autobiography”

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• And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

  Gertrude Stein

  Being Yourself, Believe, Identity

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Everybody's Autobiography”, p.76, Vintage

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• If I lost control of the business I'd lose myself - or at least the ability to be myself. Owning myself is a way to be myself.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Identity, Way, Lost

  "The secretive world of Oprah Winfrey" by Ed Pilkington, www.theguardian.com. April 16, 2010.

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• I think a lot of self-identity and inner-personal development is hampered by consumerism and capitalism because we see ourselves as a reflection of the TV, rather than as a reflection of the people who are around us, truly.

  Aloe Blacc

  Thinking, Reflection, Self

  "Aloe Blacc Discusses His Grand Scheme to Get Some Dollars". Interview with Brandon Deroche, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 15, 2011.

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• Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.

  Carl Schmitt

  Romantic, Famous Love, Best Love

  Carl Schmitt (2007). “Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political”, p.85, Telos Press Publishing

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• Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Romantic, Famous Love, Best Love

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1989). “Conversations of German Refugees ; Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, Or, The Renunciants”, p.296, Princeton University Press

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• The roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.

  Joan Halifax

  Roots, Self, Wind

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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, Identity, Fixed

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

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• We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.

  Andre Gide

  Order, Ideas, Identity

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• Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

  Love, Horse, Food

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• My parents raised me to not ever look at race or color, so it doesn't have a big part in my self-identity.

  Robert Griffin III

  Race, Self, Color

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• Tell me how you read and I'll tell you who you are.

  Martin Heidegger

  Romantic, Famous Love, Best Love

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• Nail me to my car and I'll tell you who you are

  Chris Burden

  Romantic, Famous Love, Best Love

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• What people call the spirit of the times is mostly their own spirit in which the times mirror themselves.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Integrity, Mirrors, Hypocrisy

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• It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master

  Francis Fukuyama

  Self, Desire, Identity

  Francis Fukuyama (2006). “The End of History and the Last Man”, p.198, Simon and Schuster

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• And yes, there definitely are many good desires. For example, without the desire for food we would not stay alive. It is when our desire becomes an unquenchable craving or obsession, or causes us to do harm to ourselves or others, that it creates suffering and unhappiness. If you have ever been hurt because you tied your happiness or well-being to a person, place, opinion, self-identity, behavior, or goal, then you have firsthand experience of desire.

  Don Altman

  Hurt, Self, Goal

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• The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Self, Oneness, Diversity

  Alfred North Whitehead (2010). “Process and Reality”, p.228, Simon and Schuster

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• Regimes are modes of self-discipline, but are not solely constituted by the orderings of convention in day-to-day life; they are personal habits, organised in some part according to social conventions, but also formed by personal inclinations and dispositions. Regimes are of central importance to self-identity precisely because they connect habits with aspects of the visible appearance of the body.

  Anthony Giddens

  Self, Discipline, Identity

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