Best 2380 quotes in «identity quotes» category

The idea of reappropriation isn’t a new one. The process of turning negative words, symbols, or ideas into positive parts of our own identity – was used for social justice movements long before hipsters thought that being ironic was cool. Whether it is repurposing a racial epithet or taking on a stereotype for sociopolitical empowerment, it’s an important process that has been around for thousands of years and continues to change society today.

The individuals in a family fit together like pieces in a puzzle, forming a larger picture, making clear the nature of the whole and its parts.

The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows

...the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.

The key to understanding every story is to find yourself in it.

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides.

The main character, Gene Moore, is shown how much of his identity is wrapped up in his career and potential in that career. When he comes home from war no longer able to see himself as a baseball prospect, he isn't sure who he is. This is thoroughly reinforced every time one of his acquaintances identifies him by baseball or inquires about his status. How much of our identity and worth is wrapped up in our job title or the one we are aspiring to?

the man eventually becomes what he dreams of" By T. Afsin Ilgar - Ted`s Tale

The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Roman Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or anti-fascism. In both cases the method remains exactly the same: a person stubbornly defending the superiority of cats over other animals is doing basically the same thing as one who maintains that Mussolini was the sole saviour of Italy: he is proud of this attribute of the self and he tries to make this attribute (a cat or Mussolini) acknowledged and loved by everyone. Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.

The mind is strong. It survives, even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a seed—your self.

the mind is strong. It survives, even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a seed--your self. You must believe in your own powers.

The mirror it was and life it spelled, The road ahead, and the time past stepped, All gathered in one; one to all paired, My life is so different from all the world’s threads. My breaths are mine, my woes are too, If my life were put through you, You sure would unlikely pursue, It should be left for me to gather, I am its sculptor, mine would be the hammer.

The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember.

The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don’t change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it’s that of a nation or a single human being.

The moment you begin to see yourself as GOD sees you, it gives you permission, authority and the audacity to become what you see through His eyes.

The moment was surreal. A sometimes-autistic young man with two identities lecturing a room full of zombies on feelings and realities.

The more fucked up you are, the more I like you. As long as you've managed to hold onto your identity through all the shit, then it won't matter how twisted you are. I will love you more for it.

The more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.

The most fundamental change in people at this time was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.

The most sexy trait in a woman is- when she starts taking the world by a storm!

The most difficult thing a failure can do is accept his identity or status

The most tragic thing anyone could ever say to us is “Oh – you're a Christian? I had no idea!” It is not who we say we are, but how we are recognized. Let's remember, “In Antioch the disciples were first called Christians “ and By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Dear brothers and sisters, let our walk match our talk and be doers of the word...

Then August knew. Thomas didn’t dwell on things. Thomas was strong, and he didn’t know what it was to be afraid. He knew he could get what he wanted, never questioning his identity or who he would be the next day. He was everything August wasn’t, and that’s why August hated him.

Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression as she registered what he was telling her. Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant.

The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ... In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it. The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.

The novel comes from a long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when the characters come alive and the author disappears, take us into another world.

Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket. 'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can." [Keynote Address, University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)]

The only antidote to the unnerving effects of such incoherence is integrity. People and organizations with integrity are wholly themselves. No aspect of self stands different or apart. At their center is clarity, not conflict. When they go inside to find themselves, there is only one self there.

The official erasure of any existence before enslavement – as if black Americans did not exist before the yolk and the chains and whip – has always created a passion for us. Black people need to find out. We have to find out Who We Are and Where We Come From.

The old scholar was watching the noisy young people around him and it suddenly occurred to him that he was the only one in the whole audience who had the privilege of freedom, for he was old. Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future. He is alone with approaching death and death has no ears and does not need to be pleased. In the face of death a man can do and say what pleases his own self.

The Only mattered to him.Iconoclasm.

The only thing that comes close to defining me correctly is my love.

The past does not define me, it ignites me. The past is not a piece of me, it has placed me

The path you walk is unique and needed. There is no other like yours. On your path you experience love, joy and peace, as well as loneliness, sadness and torment. These all are specific lessons you choose to rediscover your divine identity.

The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration, that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations, which, taken as a group, represented a secure version of the past that I had been constructing since 1992. But there was another, irruptive, sense of things past. The sudden reencounter in the present, of something or someone long forgotten, some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa.

The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all. (p.171)

The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.

The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.

The question “who am I” is the first question that every person should ask himself

The quality of man, when at risk and in danger, are of worth, and of woman, her qualities in all other instances; to be of both, to have identity, yet to serve with all capabilities, more better than few, and those working better than those not, and expand being comfortable with all and every role – yes, those of man, when the world falls apart, but the man exists in all and the woman also. Fabrications, all can fight and all will.

The "real" me? I can live without him.

There are varieties of life unknown to you. Their whole identity is: you can't find out.

There are three key questions that must/should guide you in life; 1. What is your identity? 2. What is /are your value(s) to others? and 3. Where is your final destination after everything?

The Rebellions were the first gang in The Bahamas, to come up with a popular logo/brand in the wearing of Raiders clothing. However, other neighborhoods gave birth to their own gangs using popular sporting team images as their official colors and name. You had the Hoyas Bull Dogs out of Kemp Road; the Coconut Grove area took on the name Nike, which became their clothing of choice. Miami Street took on the name Hurricanes, and wore Miami Hurricanes clothing. However, when you look at it closely, because of the lack of involved fathers, a lot of us were simply lacking an image and a positive identity of ourselves.

The recognition and the acceptance of the Other's humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to -know- that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows.

There comes a time when you just have to say, “No!” – to the requests and to the system.

There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow (p. 262)

There are so many voices heard today asserting that one should "have religion" or "believe," but all they mean is that one should associate himself, "sign up" with some religious group. Stand up and be counted. As if religion were somehow primarily a matter of gregariousness...