Best 2380 quotes in «identity quotes» category

A person has to be comfortable in his or her own skin.

A person is an objective entity, which as a definite subject has the closest contacts with the whole (external) world and is most intimately involved with it precisely because of its inwardness, its interior life.

A person's name is a fate-conjuring incantation.

A person's true identity can often be difficult to discern, even to themselves, causing one to question their character, their calling, their very existence. For most, time gives clarity, but for others, these questions remained unanswered for an identity can not be fully defined when it is a guarded secret.

A person who decides, voluntarily, as an adult, unconstrained by outside circumstances, to leave her native land and adopt a hitherto unfamiliar language and culture, has to face the fact that for the rest of her life she will be involved in theatre, imitation, make-believe.

A person who is truly cool is a work of art. And remember, original works of art cost exponentially higher than imitations. Just take a look at the the coolest people in history. They will always be a part of history for being extremely original individuals, not imitations.

A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could have daring syntax and clever cacophony, it could have a neat and ordered rhyme scheme...but, if it loses its authenticity, its ability to convey the very heart and soul of the poet, then all the euphony and cacophony in the world cannot make up for the loss of its identity as a poem. And that is the true cacophony.

Appearances can be deceiving, but the true colours of your soul remain.

Apparently, a week Japan was laughable; but a strong Japan was immediately transformed into the prime example of a "Yellow Peril". Might Japan forever be stuck in a kind of no man's land between East and West, not allowed to assimilate into the international order of the Western nations as an equal, forever grouped with the countries of the East among which she felt herself superior, and respected fully by neither group?

Applause washed toward her, liquid and sparkling. People in the audience held up their phones to take her picture, cameras held like candles. She had enough vanity left to wish for privacy. In heaven, she thought, tired and uncomforted, the lights will be even brighter. Maybe there it will not be so bad to be seen for what we are.

A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ( "Promised me a breeze of freedom" )

Aretha Franklin doğallığının teyit edilmesinden ziyadesiyle memnun görünmesine rağmen, bu teyidin hiç bir zaman güvence altına alınmamış olması, doğallığının etkisinin ancak o heteroseksüel tanınma uğrağının sonucunda sağlanması konusunda tamamen ve paradoksal bir ihtiyatlılık içindedir de. Yine de Aretha'nın 'Bana kendimi doğal bir kadın gibi hissettiriyorsun' şarkısı, bunun bir tür metaforik ikame, bir hilekarlık, sıradan heteroseksüel transvestitlik eyleminin doğurduğu bir ontolojik yanılsama kapsamında bir tür yüceltme ve anlık katılım olduğunu akla getirmektedir.

Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.

Art itself is a philosophy; it allows us to immerse ourselves freely in our own identities, and in our own pace.

A second relationship between advertising and identity is seen in the growing exploitation of desirable identities. Farberman and others have described how advertisers have marketed their products less and less on the basis of the product's merits and more and more by associating a "dream identity" with a possession of a given product. The suggestion is that the possession of a particular brand of car or cigarette will furnish you with the identity of a successful, attractive, worthy person. The message is clear - accumulating things is an effective means of achieving identity and actualizing one's potential.

As every languageless, stateless, selfless nation has one last, twisted image of its worst and best, we have the ceilidh. Here we pretend we are Highland, pretend we have mysteries in our work, pretend we have work. We forget our record of atrocities wherever we have been made masters and become comfortable servants again. Our present and our past creep in to change each other and we feel angry and sad and Scottish. Perhaps we feel free.

A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

As I turned to leave the tent, she said, "Don't worry. Your own mother wouldn't know you." I said, "She never has.

As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.

As men, we often identify with our career, or some thing that we DO. But what we DO is not who we ARE.

...as I was sifting through a heap of old and new "identity cards," I noticed that something was missing: my identity.

a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. In the language of the smallest European people, in Icelandic, the term for "family" is fjölskylda; the etymology is eloquent: skylda means "obligation"; fjöl means "multiple." Family is thus "a multiple obligation." Icelanders have a single word for "family ties": fjölskyldubönd: "the cords (bönd) of multiple obligations." Thus in the big family that is a small country, the artist is bound in multiple ways, by multiple cords. When Nietzsche noisily savaged the German character, when Stendhal announced that he preferred Italy to his homeland, no German or Frenchman took offense; if a Greek or a Czech dared to say the same thing, his family would curse him as a detestable traitor.

a square is not just about light, air, proportion, and people. It must also give form to some shared notion of civic identity. [Michael Kimmelman, "Culture: Power of the Place"].

As the days dwindled towards the end of the week I knew only one thing: I couldn't return to our old life. Haroon had taken Honour and Al with him,

As the social matrix becomes increasingly subject to rapid fluctuations, throwing out anchors into a collectivised past becomes more prominent than movement into a future. The desire to establish a core identity within the profusion of styles has led to image building becoming an industry in itself—as much reflected by the tactics of political groups and corporate bodies, as in the fetishistic scramble for designer labels and trendy occult symbols. Identity has, therefore, become another commodity to be traded in the marketplace. The gulf between objective icons and the Illusory has widened to such an extent that illusions have come to equal value.

As the conference continued it occurred to me finally that it wasn't really about Indian history as it was written, but really about rewriting it by taking a fresh look at race, ethnicity, gender, and a mix of sociocultural questions... I just couldn't believe how far along the desi scene was, not just socially but intellectually, how many people were out there thinking about it. This whole event so far rocked my world, muddled me still more, and delivered a series of tiny epiphanies, all at the same time. To be honest, I was quite intimidated by the dialogue going on, as well as by the passion and conviction of these people on so many subjects which I, frankly, had never really even thought about. ...A history of a people in transit -- what could that be card catalogued under? And the history of the ABCD. Everyone seemed to know about this ABCD thing -- that didn't seem very confused to me! And it was a relatively new phenomenon; it had never occurred to me that things going on now could have a history already. The moments that made up my life in the present tense seemed so fleetingly urgent and self-contained to me: I'd always felt my life had very little to do with my parents' and especially their parents' histories...and that it would have very little effect on anything to come. But the way these people were talking -- about desis in Hollywood; South Asian Studies departments; the relatively new Asian Indian slot on the census -- was hummingly sculpting the air, as if they were making history as they spoke. Making it, messily but surely, even simply by speaking. I was feeling it, too -- a sense of history in the making. But where did I fit in to any of it? And how come no one had told me?

As the nation diversifies, the homogeneous communities that people seem to prefer become increasingly fine grained. When immigrants become landlords, many rent only to people from their own country. Apartment buildings can become entirely Korean, Salvadoran, or Guatemalan, for example. Immigrant landlords are often unaware of non-discrimination laws, and do not hesitate to tell others they are not welcome. A lawyer for Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles noted that some managers rent only to people from a particular state of Mexico, adding, 'Our fair housing laws haven't even anticipated that.

A story meant to motivate all and sundry irrespective of their circumstances

As we walk down the steps to the unchartered rims of our life, we may become aware of unsuspected beacons we have ignored thus far, discover unsolved enigmas of our identity and so get insight into the undisclosed intricacies of our shared environment. ( "Only silence remained" )

As you understand more, you will become more.

At a certain point in his life he stopped searching for himself in everything that exists and gave in to temptations. Or, as you say, he sinned and later fled.

At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you.

Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.

At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her skin and her lips and the insides of her thighs. She knows she can smile, smell like the others. Her skin would bleed too if pricked and yet this reality does not belong to the ones sleeping on the platform floor; this reality is hers and her alone. Thus when she puts the mirror back, she rummages in her handbag, searching for that thing called identity: some of it lost somewhere in the railway colony she had just left behind, some in Sudhanshu’s left jacket pocket, the rest of it scattered here around broken teacups on railings, totally aberrant and arbitrary.

At least when one speaks of oneself one is passionate, well-informed and specific.

A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.

A TODOS, en algún momento, se nos ha revelado nuestra existencia como algo particular, intransferible y precioso. Casi siempre esta revelación se sitúa en la adolescencia. El descubrimiento de nosotros mismos se manifiesta como un sabernos solos; entre el mundo y nosotros se abre una impalpable, transparente muralla: la de nuestra conciencia.

...at some point we must achieve our identity -we can't be always in adolescence seeking who we are...

Auf dem allerersten Foto, das von mir geschossen wurde, liege ich auf der Säuglingsstation, eingewickelt in eine gelbe Decke. Nicht blau, wie all die anderen Jungen, und auch nicht rosa wie die Mädchen. Es war eine gelbe Decke, und ich habe sie mein Leben lang aufgehoben. Ich schlief jede Nacht damit. Selbst als es mir peinlich wurde, weil ich zu alt dafür war, liebte ich diese Decke. Aber ich habe eben immer Sachen geliebt, die meine Liebe nicht erwiderten. Ich habe mich immer gefragt, ob die Leute, die mich und meine gelbe Decke zwischen den anderen Babys sahen, mich für einen Jungen oder ein Mädchen hielten. Ob es überhaupt eine Rolle spielte. Ob ich an meinem ersten Tag auf dieser Erde vielleicht keins von beidem war. Ich war einfach nur schön.

At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down.

At the same time she felt a tremendous, consuming, uncertainty that cancelled out everything, that left her with nothing...She had come to that city looking for another version of herself, a transfiguration. But she understood that her identity was insidious, a root that she would never be able to pull up, a prison in which she would be trapped. Al tempo stesso sentiva un'incertezza tremenda che la consumava, che cancellava tutto, che la lasciava senza nulla...Era venuta in questa città cercando un'altra versioe di sé, una transfigurazione. Ma aveva capito che la sua identitá era insidiosa, una radice che lei non sarebbe mai riuscita a estirpare, un carcere in cui si sarebbe incastrata.

Awareness influences and enables all that we are and all that we strive for.

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are? -Richard

Awareness is not a school quiz that can be passed by reading and memorizing some facts. It’s a journey that is fueled by our intent to be open, honest, and free.

A woman made of parts is a dangerous thing," Grandma says. "You never know when she'll throw away a piece you may need...

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.... One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

A woman will always be insecure if she attaches her identity and sense of worth to the amount of male attention she gets.

A young woman faces the decision of whether to marry a certain man whom she loves but who has deeply rooted, traditional ideas concerning marriage, family life, and the roles of men and women in each. A sober assessment of her future tell the woman that each of the two alternatives offers real but contrasting goods. One life offers the possibility of a greater degree of personal independence, the chance to pursue a career, perhaps more risk and adventure, while the other offers the rewards of parenting, stability, and a life together with a man whom, after all, she is in love with. In order to choose in a self-determined mode the woman must realize that the decision she faces involves more than the choice between two particular actions; it is also a choice between two distinct identities. In posing the questions "Who am I? Which of the two lives is really me?" she asks herself not a factual question about her identity but a fundamental practical question about the relative values of distinct and incommensurable goods. The point I take to be implicit in Tugendhat's (and Fichte's) view of the practical subject is that it would be mistaken to suppose that the woman had at her disposal an already established hierarchy of values that she must simply consult in order to decide whether to marry. Rather, her decision, if self-determined, must proceed from a ranking of values that emerges only in the process of reflecting upon the kind of person she wants to be.