Self Identity Quotes

“We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.”
― Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism

“Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.”
― Zeena Schreck

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don't belong. You will always find it because you've made that your mission. Stop scouring people's faces for evidence that you're not enough. You will always find it because you've made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don't negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

“If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.

Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are a whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.

Yet without a proper ego nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there?

At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that ego.

Just what kind of narrative?

It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway, most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios-they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their own self-identity.”
― Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

“To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.”
― Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

“I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

“To know our true essence, we need to leave all of the energy of low vibrations out of our consciousness. We must withdraw all of our life force from that realm, because it is parasitic. It has little life force of its own and cannot exist unless we give it life through our attention, imagination and emotions.”
― Kenneth Schmitt, Quantum Energetics and Spirituality Volume 1: Aligning with Universal Consciousness

“If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“[M]y discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.”
― Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism

“We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.”
― Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism

“She was a woman who knew who she was and how she had gotten there.”
― Lisa Mangum, The Forgotten Locket

“Self-identity is inextricably bound up with the identity of the surroundings.”
― Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom

“Who you want to be is already inside of you waiting for you to confront who you are and tag them in to help you win the battle of the mind.”
― Sanjo Jendayi

“If I can’t figure out how to live on my own一how to do things on my own一how am I supposed to live at all?”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“But for all of that life-shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn’t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Grand failures – the misfortunes of living – provide human beings with an identity. A person is the sum of his or her grievous errors.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Our self-worth should come from within, based on our perception of ourselves, not how others perceive us.”
― Sam Izad, Snackable Existentialism: Small Portions, Big Ideas

“Although what I see in the mirror often doesn’t fit who I believe myself to be, that person provides me with everything that I need to be everything that I am. And I have been granted the privilege of spending every minute of my tomorrow with that person.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Today I will look for your fingerprint in everything around me instead of creating footprints that all lead away from me.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Don’t miss the fact that you are not defined by your own definition, for to do so is to suffocate in the confines of small spaces.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I am strong enough to know that I don't have to pretend, anymore, about who and what I am. I'm even strong enough to fail.”
― Stephanie Burgis

“You do not possess the power to make something what it is not. But you do have the power to believe the lie that you did, which makes it difficult to embrace the reality that you cannot and should not.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“You are bigger than the choices that would lead you to believe that you are smaller.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The essential ingredients for the best self that you can create is found in the self that you’re running from.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Identifying myself as a fishing pole will not catch any fish.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents' definition of me. They had defined me early on, coined me like a word they have translated on some mysterious hieroglyph, and I had spent my life coming to terms with that specious coinage. My parents had succeeded in making me a stranger to myself. They had turned me into the exact image of what they needed at the time, and because there was something essentially complaisant and orthodox in my nature, I allowed them to knead and shape me into the smooth lineaments of their nonpareil child.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“I longed for their approval, their applause, their pure uncomplicated love for me, and I looked for it years after I realized they were not even capable of letting me have it. To love one's children is to love oneself, and this was a state of supererogatory grace denied my parents by birth and circumstance. I needed to reconnect to something I had lost. Somewhere I had lost touch with the kind of man I had the potential of being. I needed to effect a reconciliation with that unborn man and try to coax him gently toward his maturity.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“No poder orientarse no es únicamente no reconocer lo que te rodea, no encontrar tu hogar; es no reconocerte a ti mismo, que tanto el mundo como tu propio yo te resulten extraños”
― Patrik Svensson, Un inmenso azul: El mar, el abismo y la curiosidad humana

“Humans are cowards in the face of happiness. It takes courage to hold on to happiness.”
― Novala Takemoto, Kamikaze Girls