quotations about identity
People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.
BERTOLT BRECHT
In the Jungle of Cities
When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.
ERIK ERIKSON
"The Problem of Ego Identity", Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow
They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
This also shows wherein the identity of the same man consists, viz. in participation of the same continued life by particles of matter successively united to the same organized body.
JOHN LOCKE
Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding
Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
MARGARET DRABBLE
A Summer Bird-Cage
Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Cry Wolf
People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus
It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage--his name is self.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before.
AYN RAND
Anthem
What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person.... They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.
NORMAN MAILER
Harlot's Ghost