Personal Identity Quotes

Once you get below the floor of our personal identities, we're all connected. Perhaps that's why we can move into others' lives.

The woman's personal identity is a vast undiscovered country -- with which Society has yet to acquaint itself, and by which it is yet to be revolutionized.

There be as many persons of a king, as there be petty constables in his kingdom. And so there are, or else he cannot be obeyed. But I never said that a king, and every one of his persons, are the same substance.

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

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

In every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work.

The memoir was a very personal book. I wrote it as a personal journey and search about who my father was and how my family had come together and come apart - sorting all that out, you know, issues of personal identity.

It's the difference between watching a football game between two teams you don't care about, and watching a game where you have some kind of personal identity with one of the teams, if only a huge bet.

The disciple is rich not in possessions, but in personal identity.

I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.

Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant - but this is no indication of the true worth of one's total human identity: past, present and future!

The actor has a constant problem of personal identity.

After all, what is your personal identity? It is what you really are, your real self. None of us is what he thinks he is, or what other people think he is, still less what his passport says he is. And it is fortunate for most of us that we are mistaken. We do not generally know what is good for us. That is because, in St. Bernard's language, our true personality has been concealed under the 'disguise' of a false self, the ego, whom we tend to worship in place of God.

Community cannot take root in a divided life. Long before community assumes external shape and form, it must be present as seed in the undivided self: only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others. Community is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace, the flowing of personal identity and integrity into the world of relationships.

Like the Pentagon, our social science often reduces all phenomena to dollars and body counts. Sexuality, family unity, kinship, masculine solidarity, maternity, motivation, nurturing, all the rituals of personal identity and development, all the bonds of community, seem "sexist," "superstitious," "mystical," "inefficient," "discriminatory." And, of course, they are -- and they are also indispensable to a civilized society.

Our citizens will lose their confidence or trust in the values and principles of the international community, especially if our personal identity is denied.

I give you the chameleon, whose ability to blend itself into the background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology and the foundations of a personal identity

Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.

I guess I'd like to have my cake and eat it, too. I want to be known for having a recognizable style. I believe having your own personal identity is what makes you competitive. On the other hand, I would like to be versatile and be challenged to go in new directions.

In a time where the world is becoming personalized, when the mobile phone, the burger, everything has its own personal identity, how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others?

The emptiness I speak about is not the emptiness the mind imagines. It is not blank. Your body can continue expressing in a natural way. Intelligence is there. Emotions can come. Everything can play, but inside there is total serenity and peace. No planning, no strategising, no personal identity is there. Just the space of pure being. It is what we are, but we dream and believe we are not.

In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks

One pits his wits against apparently inscrutable nature, wooing her with ardor but nature is blind justice who cannot recognize personal identity.

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?

Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

There's that older poem of John Ashbery's-"America"-with the pun "I'm a wrecker," so wreckage and building out of the ashes of that. We're haunted by the genocide that is America, the decimation of so many native cultures. As a mix-blood European ancestry American, you're a nexus of all those violences, and yet there's a relative personal identity as well.

James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

Wendy Doniger has spent decades collecting not only myths from ancient texts but stories of all kinds from novels, movies, newspapers about an old mystery: what has or hasn't happened in bed for centuries. Rich in insights about sex, lies, and personal identity, the result is entertaining, enthralling, and, yes, sexy.

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'

After death the soul possesses self-consciousness, otherwise, it would be the subject of spiritual death, which has already been disproved. With this self-consciousness necessarily remains personality and the consciousness of personal identity.

Writing is an act of hope. It means carving order out of chaos, of challenging one's own beliefs and assumptions, of facing the world with eyes and heart wide open. Through writing we declare a personal identity amid faceless anonymity. We find purpose and beauty and meaning even when the rational mind argues that none of these exist. Writing therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page?

Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter.

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.