You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must...

Don’t let what you thought you were yesterday keep you from becoming what you’re meant to be today.

If you include all the fraudulent documents, about 80 percent of Haitians have no reliable identity documents at all.

People who made their dreams come true didn’t simply go after it. They changed the person they were, in order to fit the type of person that would live that type of dream.

If mistakes determine our worth, then we’re all worthless.Thank God that’s not the case.

In seasons of hiddenness our sense of value is disrupted, stripped of what “others” affirmed us to be. In this season God intends to give us an unshakable identity in Him, that no amount of...

Se amava quel viso non indulgente, era perché era netto, espressivo e risoluto.Vedeva, o gli sembrava di vedere, come tali qualità fossero state mascherate o soffocate da atteggiamenti più convenzionali: una modestia simulata, un’appropriata pazienza,...

While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for...

The gap that was created during those transatlantic voyages hundreds of years ago.That gap is the matrix of Saudade – The Longing, I think, that all Africans in the West have, that is at the...

When compared side by side, my days can barely be distinguished from one another. The only difference is what I do after work and with whom I do it.

You are who you are. Deal with it.

I am a complicated person with a simple life.

As a person, I have to claim my persona as my own. If I don’t, my clone will do it for me.

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette’s syndrome: “Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with...

No, non imiterò mai coloro che cancellano le proprie tracce, ripudiano il proprio passato e sono morti, anche se con equilibrismi intellettuali fanno finta di essere vivi. Le mie radici sono laggiù, all’Est, su questo...

The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had...

Mind makes a man of God.

Individuality and creativity are slowly dampened by a normal job with normal people.

Finally, it is wrong to say that “nothing” is more basic to the identity of the church than suffering. Nothing is more basic to the identity of the institutional church than the preaching of the...

Our true self is made manifest in love.

It’s complicated, what makes a person. I think…part of it is experience—whether you seek them out or they come to you—and your reactions to them. Even then, you may not know exactly how something affects...

They’re going to have to grow that identity with some younger players and some of the veteran guys that they brought in to fill that void. You know, the one thing obviously in Jersey is...

I’m not the same person I was before, and I am deathly afraid I will never be her again…

Though blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over—she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern...

Sleep my little baby-ohSleep until you wakenWhen you wake you’ll see the worldIf I’m not mistaken…Kiss a loverDance a measure,Find your nameAnd buried treasure…Face your lifeIts pain, Its pleasure,Leave no path untaken.

Lydon Johnson realized he really was President, that his identity had changed by President Kennedy’s shocking death, when aides who had been like family to him minutes before, stood in his presence on Air Force...

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty...

We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains

Everything is music for the born musician.

Performancism is the mindset that equates our identity and value directly with our performance and accomplishments.

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than… a collector. Ownership is the most...

Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our...

We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard’s education. The trick is not to amass...

come hither” to be reason enough to go.

Alan, you seem to think we won’t like you unless you do things just like everyone else. Have you ever thought we might like you because you’re different?

Just after my mother died, I grabbed hold of my Divergence like it was a hand outstretched to save me. I needed that word to tell me who I was when everything else was coming...

Every actor has his own identity. I don’t aspire to be Bond. My quest is to do something new, something different.

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance”.

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of...

Thus are many identities, over time, shown to be temporary alignments of components involved in a deeper allegiance.

How do I know you’re not crazy?” she asks. “How do I know you’re not the craziest dude I’ve ever met?” “You’ll have to test me out.” “You have my info,” she says. “I’ll think...

But — my dear, my heart is BROKEN! I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything — and he is — THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL!! What is...

All that remains is to forge the #commitment. Regardless of how right everything feels, words never last.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it….

I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton–go figure. My mother was called Wednesday, but was born on a Sunday–I don’t know...

I am not who I pretend to be, even when I act like myself.

It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing – to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos – of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings...

Who can give a man this, his own name?

The big uncookable sections of who we are, they’re the ones I love to taste the most.

We are each what never leaves us, what we never seethe back ofis the self. But what loves usis at the back, as Eurydice wasescorting him outwithout his knowing.