Self Identity Quotes:

You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.

- Amy Tan

source: Source: www.pbs.org

topic: Thinking, Self, Differences, Be Your Own Person, Self Identity

We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

topic: Identity, Asking, Dare, Self Identity

The more isolated and disconnected we are, the more shattered and distorted our self-identity. We are not healthy when we are alone. We find ourselves when we connect to others. Without community we don't know who we are... When we live outside of healthy community, we not only lose others. We lose ourselves...Who we understand ourselves to be is dramatically affected for better or worse by those we hold closest to us.

- Erwin McManus

topic: Self, Community, Healthy, Disconnected, Self Identity

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

- Alan Watts

topic: Self Esteem, Humor, Deep Thought, Eye Opening, Define Yourself

The narrative that each person tells herself and others is a big part of how we construct our self-identities. It's one of the most important ways that we make sense of our past and present and understand our hopes for the future.

- Peg O'Connor

topic: Past, Self, Identity, Self Identity

Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.

- Esmeralda Santiago

source: Esmeralda Santiago (2006). “When I was Puerto Rican”, p.243, Da Capo Press

topic: Walks, Who You Are, Spanish Proverb, Restitution, Who Your Real Friends Are

There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.

- Pearl Bailey

source: Pearl Bailey (1969). “The raw Pearl”, Pocket

topic: Acceptance, Sour, Periods, True Identity, Self Identity

Who has deceived thee as oft as thyself.

- Benjamin Franklin

source: Benjamin Franklin (1904). “The Works of Benjamin Franklin: Including the Private as Well as the Official and Scientific Correspondence Together with the Unmutilated and Correct Version of the Autobiography”

topic: Self Identity

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

- Gertrude Stein

source: Gertrude Stein (2013). “Everybody's Autobiography”, p.76, Vintage

topic: Being Yourself, Believe, Identity, Self Identity

If I lost control of the business I'd lose myself-or at least the ability to be myself. Owning myself is a way to be myself.

- Oprah Winfrey

topic: Identity, Way, Lost, Personal Branding, Self Identity

I think a lot of self-identity and inner-personal development is hampered by consumerism and capitalism because we see ourselves as a reflection of the TV, rather than as a reflection of the people who are around us, truly.

- Aloe Blacc

source: "Aloe Blacc Discusses His Grand Scheme to Get Some Dollars". Interview with Brandon Deroche, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 15, 2011.

topic: Reflection, Thinking, Self, Self Identity

Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.

- Carl Schmitt

source: Carl Schmitt (2007). “Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political”, p.85, Telos Press Publishing

topic: Enemy, Who You Are, Turkish, Spanish Proverb, Restitution

Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

source: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1989). “Conversations of German Refugees ; Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, Or, The Renunciants”, p.296, Princeton University Press

topic: Romantic, Famous Love, Best Love, Turkish, Spanish Proverb

The roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.

- Joan Halifax

topic: Self, Wind, Roots, Living Things, Self Identity

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

- Luigi Pirandello

topic: Lying, Identity, Fixed, Good Faith, Self Identity

We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.

- Andre Gide

topic: Order, Ideas, Identity, Self Identity

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.

- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

topic: Love, Food, Health, Spanish Proverb, Slow Food

My parents raised me to not ever look at race or color, so it doesn't have a big part in my self-identity.

- Robert Griffin III

topic: Race, Self, Color, Self Identity

Tell me how you read and I'll tell you who you are.

- Martin Heidegger

topic: Who You Are, Spanish Proverb, Restitution, Who Your Real Friends Are, Cheesy Love

Nail me to my car and I'll tell you who you are

- Chris Burden

topic: Car, Nails, Who You Are, Spanish Proverb, Restitution

What people call the spirit of the times is mostly their own spirit in which the times mirror themselves.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

topic: Integrity, Mirrors, Hypocrisy, Self Identity

It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master

- Francis Fukuyama

source: Francis Fukuyama (2006). “The End of History and the Last Man”, p.198, Simon and Schuster

topic: Self, Desire, Identity, Self Identity

And yes, there definitely are many good desires. For example, without the desire for food we would not stay alive. It is when our desire becomes an unquenchable craving or obsession, or causes us to do harm to ourselves or others, that it creates suffering and unhappiness. If you have ever been hurt because you tied your happiness or well-being to a person, place, opinion, self-identity, behavior, or goal, then you have firsthand experience of desire.

- Don Altman

topic: Hurt, Self, Goal, Self Identity

The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

- Alfred North Whitehead

source: Alfred North Whitehead (2010). “Process and Reality”, p.228, Simon and Schuster

topic: Self, Oneness, Diversity, Self Identity

Regimes are modes of self-discipline, but are not solely constituted by the orderings of convention in day-to-day life; they are personal habits, organised in some part according to social conventions, but also formed by personal inclinations and dispositions. Regimes are of central importance to self-identity precisely because they connect habits with aspects of the visible appearance of the body.

- Anthony Giddens

topic: Self, Discipline, Identity, Organised, Day To Day Life

Lifestyles are routined practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favoured milieux for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity.

- Anthony Giddens

topic: Light, Self, Practice, Self Identity

[C]ultivated risk-taking represents an 'experiment with trust' (in the sense of basic trust) which consequently has implications for an individual's self-identity. (...) In cultivated risk-taking, the encounter with danger and its resolution are bound up in the same activity, whereas in other consequential settings the payoff of chosen strategies may not be seen for years afterwards.

- Anthony Giddens

topic: Self, Years, Risk, Self Identity

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.

- Amy Tan

source: Source: www.pbs.org

topic: Writing, Self, Identity, Self Identity

The self identity of Man is transcultural, and thus cannot have any single point of reference. Pluralism is not synonymous with tolerance of a variety of opinions. Pluralism amounts to the recognition of the unthinkable, the absurd, and up to a limit, intolerable. Reality in itself does not need to be transparent intelligible.

- Raimon Panikkar

topic: Reality, Men, Self, Pluralism, Pluralism Is

A real life, a life that leaves a deposit in the shape of something alive.... It's difficult to say what makes a life a real life.... You could also say it depends on a person being identical with himself.

- Max Frisch

topic: Real, Identity, Alive, Self Identity

One has to know what is the ultimate goal of our life. The ultimate goal of our evolution is to become the Spirit, which is the reflection of God Almighty in our heart. That is self identity and also self knowledge. Also, one becomes one with the all-pervading Divine power of love. Our awareness is enlightened by the Spirit and Divine vibrations start flowing through our central nervous system enlightening our being.

- Nirmala Srivastava

topic: Love, Wisdom, Yoga, Divine Power, Central Nervous System

As Hubert Benoit said, it is not the identification with the ego that is the problem, but the exclusive nature of the identification. When our self-identity expands beyond the ego, into the deeper psychic, then even into the Unborn and One Taste, the ego is simply taken up and subsumed in a grander identity. But the ego itself remains as the functional self in the gross realm, and it might even appropriately be intensified and made more powerful, simply because it is now plugged into the entire Kosmos.

- Ken Wilber

topic: Powerful, Taken, Self, Unborn, Self Identity

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.

- Douglas Coupland

topic: Dream, Mean, Self, Thunderstorm, Snowball

The body is an object in which we are all privileged, or doomed, to dwell, the source of feelings of well-being and pleasure, but also the site of illnesses and strains. (...) [I]t is an action-system, a mode of praxis, and its practical immersion in the interactions of day-to-day life is an essential part of the sustaining of a coherent sense of self-identity.

- Anthony Giddens

source: Anthony Giddens (2013). “Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age”, p.103, John Wiley & Sons

topic: Self, Feelings, Identity, Immersion, Praxis

I've tried to be clear about who I am, and be as open as possible with the press, and speak extremely candidly and openly about stuff. I feel like in almost every instance, it's completely backfired, and I feel like people have all these kind of absurd ideas about the way I think about myself, and my own self-identity.

- Zachary Cole Smith

topic: Thinking, Self, Who I Am, Self Identity