Identity quotes
1.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside identity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself."
"The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it."
"Strictly speaking, "you" cannot become enlightened, because who you take yourself to be is like a ripple in the ocean of consciousness - or a little wave if you're a VIP - and the ripple doesn't become enlightened until it realizes that its ripple-identity is ultimately a misperception, that it is the ocean taking on a fleeting ripple-form."
"If we have no identity apart from our jobs, we are truly vulnerable."
"Ah, if only I had brought a cigar with me! This would have established my identity."
"So when I was about 13 or 14, I realized I was attracted to women and then made the assumption that I was a lesbian, and didn't realize that that wasn't the case. It was the fact that I was a man and a heterosexual man. The issue wasn't my sexual orientation, but rather my gender identity."
"It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did but simply based on their identity."
"Some women have 'always' been lesbians. Others, like myself, have 'become' one. As much a sociocultural construction as it is an effect of early childhood experiences, sexual identity is nether innate nor simply acquired, but dynamically (re)structured by forms of fantasy private and public, conscious and unconscious, which are culturally available and historically specific."
"A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything."
"Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity."
"Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools."
"From quite early on, I had this idea of compartmentalized identities - 'this is how you are when you are with your mum, and this is how you are when you are with your dad' - so it seemed like I could never absolutely be myself. And the image of myself as compromised and inconsistent made me want to withdraw from the world even further. I had a sense of formulating a paper-mache version of myself to send out in the world, while I sat controlling it remotely from some smug suburban barracks."
"If you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are."
"You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality."
"You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they've served their purpose. But you've got to learn to throw things away eventually."
"I am just beginning to be more comfortable with my identity."
"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."
"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"
"Therefore they should come to the table and reach an agreement that would protect their identity."
"Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always retro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its 'up-to-dateness', its 'relevance') is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling."
