Quotes about Identity

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

A black Hole in your dimensional space is another reality system whose co-ordiantes interface with those of the Earth. It is a locus of being for a collective identity, just as Earth is a locus of being for a collective Human identity. The collective or star referred to as Black Hole is neither dead nor gone. Its focus of consciousness is just temporarily redirected into other dimensional co-ordinates that preclude its appearance in your space/time continuum. The field your scientists interpret to be unoccupiable and inescapable is actually holding the star's place in space, the way you might put a "Reserved" sign on your airplane seat if you wanted to get off for a walk between legs of a flight. Because the collective identity of the star has taken a walk somewhere your consciousness cannot currently reach, instead of percieving its manifestation, you percieve it as a gap in your space/time continuum. Your scientists think of it as being sealed off behind its own event horizon. In fact it is Human perception that is sealed off behind their current consciousness horizon.

When they say "Be yourself," which self do they mean?

'He's dreaming now,' said Tweedledee:  'and what do you think he's dreaming about?'
Alice said 'Nobody can guess that.'
'Why, about you!' Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly.  'And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?'
'Where I am now, of course,' said Alice.
'Not you!' Tweedledee retorted contemptuously.  'You'd be nowhere.  Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!'
'If that there King was to wake,' added Tweedledum, 'you'd go out - bang! - just like a candle!'
'I shouldn't!' Alice exclaimed indignantly.  'Besides, if I'm only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?'
'Ditto' said Tweedledum.
'Ditto, ditto' cried Tweedledee.
He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying, 'Hush!  You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise.'
'Well, it no use your talking about waking him,' said Tweedledum, 'when you're only one of the things in his dream.  You know very well you're not real.'
'I am real!' said Alice and began to cry.
'You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,' Tweedledee remarked:  'there's nothing to cry about.'
'If I wasn't real,' Alice said - half-laughing though her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous - 'I shouldn't be able to cry.'
'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?'

'And how, who am I?  I will remember, if I can!  I'm determined to do it!'  But being determined didn't help much...

Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing - turn out your toes as you walk - and remember who you are!

Be what you would seem to be - or if you'd like it put more simply - Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

It's no use now to pretend to be two people!  Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!

Dear, dear!  How queer everything is to-day!  And yesterday things went on just as usual.  I wonder if I've been changed in the night?  Let me think:  was I the same when I got up this morning?  I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.  But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?  Ah, that's the great puzzle!

He realized that he had to choose between thinking of himself as the poor victim of a thief and as an adventurer in quest of his treasure.

I'm an adventurer, looking for treasure, he said to himelf.

I do not know who lives here in my chest.
Or why the smile comes.
Am not myself, more the bare green knob of a rose that
lost every leaf and petal to the morning wind.

Help your true inner identity come true. If there is a single reality in this world. I strongly believe in the idea that it is within us. Do not go too far away to find it. It can really be nearer than you thought.

Our true beauty is defined by our soul; our appearance is just a camouflage we use to hide our true beauty, our true identity...

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

In complete control,
Pretending control,
With dignified authority,
We are charlatans…

(Or maybe just a goat's-hair brush in a painter's hand.)
We have no idea what we are.

I was dying. Of course. This was it. Curtain. Finis. I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk and prayed to Jesus for another crack at life. But then I became confused, unable to recall who Jesus’s father was. Why this should have been important I can’t venture to guess, but it got me on the subject of fathers. I realized, with an incredible sensation of vertigo, I was old enough to be my own father.

The corporate workplace, where people are kept in thrall, where total commitment is the norm, where people are stripped off their identity and have to adapt a code of conduct. This is the very antithesis of democracy. -.-

It is very hard to live with silence.  The real silence is death and this is terrible.  To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert.  You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to loses it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous.  You make yourself void.  You become silence.  You become more silent than the silence around you.  And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.

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.

Rainer Maria Rilke said, "I live my life in widening rings." It may well be useful to note the expanding of the circles in which we live, but it is also important not to lose the sensation of cycles, which may be painful to anyone living in a culture dedicated to the extending line. Maybe in life we never really develop, but only expand the rotations that give us our firm identity. Maybe we should expect always to get into familiar trouble and to repeat both the glorious and the defeating themes that are embedded in our soul.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

A simple separate person is not contained between his hat and his boots.

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the things I want to live for.  Between those two answers you can determine the identity of any person.

It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America.

I had a lot on my mind trying to put together some kind of plan for my wayward self. The future seemed made of matchsticks, fragile as a house of cards. Where would I go now? Who would I be? Would I be me or somebody else?

I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?

I wasn’t sure what was going on or what time it was or where I was or even, for that matter, who I was … but my gut told me something was terribly wrong. I opened my eyes slowly, as sensitive to light as a roll of film: just expose me and I’d vanish.

It's not important to know who you are. It's important to know what you do, and then to do it like hercules!

Those who have chosen the path of least resistance in life, who cannot bear to bring themselves to make a stern value-judgment in criticism of their own most intimate feelings, achieve what they deserve:  not self-understanding but radical self-superficialization, not a discovered but a self-ascribed identity that explains nothing, reveals nothing, means nothing, and ultimately accomplishes nothing culturally or intellectually. 

The best way to be spectacular is to be yourself.