It’s important to understand that at every point of opposition to who we are or to what God has called us to do, we are presented with the options of either conforming and giving in,...

Jesus, why would he hook up with Becca?” “Well, she’s not known for her personality or generosity of spirit, so it’s probably because she’s hot.” “She’s not as hot as you,” I said, before I...

When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying...

The resentment I felt inside was not hatred for being imprisoned or for Victor who had betrayed me but something deeper: a rebellion against the very way of things that condemned men to be imprisoned...

Our identity as an offensive team is set. As a defensive team, we’re still a question mark to the masses. But we know we’re capable of winning that way.

Lovers are not snails; they don’t have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

I am a cultural Frankinstein

I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said...

Yesterday Allison bought me nail polish in the annoying shade of mauve. How can anyone look at me and think mauve?

Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel

The most important things to be acquired for freedom and democracy, are identity and dignity.

The path you walk is unique and needed. There is no other like yours. On your path you experience love, joy and peace, as well as loneliness, sadness and torment. These all are specific lessons...

Maybe such questions bothered me so much because they are being asked about me, all the time, within the echo chamber of my own fallen psyche and by unseen rebel angels all around. Are you...

I am myself when I get up, I am myself throughout the day and I am myself when I go back to sleep, you probably might have met someone else when I was asleep and...

The barber’s assistant asks if I am a Swede. An American? Not that either. A Russian? Well, then, what are you? I love to answer such nationalistically tinted questions with a steely silence, and to...

Jerry-5486: “The most apparent thing that I noticed was how most of the people in this study derive their sense of identity and well-being from their immediate surroundings rather than from within themselves, and that’s...

So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter...

Anyone could be anybody. (Eric)

A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members – among them the need...

Felt good, though, just being what I was.

For instance, identity theft, can be an issue with regard to this industry.

Hey, you can work for the war, but you can still be feminine.” So what we see is that the mass media, film, TV, all of these things, are powerful vehicles for maintaining the kinds...

I am One. I value my uniqueness. If there were more like me I would hope they were small and easy to destroy.

I didn’t think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.

I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you’ll forgive...

Anthropologist Gary Weaver suggested looking at culture as a kind of iceberg: one portion is clearly visible above the surface of the water, while the much larger chunk of ice is hidden below. The part...

I never get used to the faces–wide-eyed and full of possibility–staring bad at me.

Treat everyone you meet as if they were you.

One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more...

More than anything, I just want to be somebody. Somebody like my own clone.

There was a way in which my grandmother’s true self was not these guests’ business; no one’s true self was the business of more than a very small number of family members or close friends.

You’re three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.

To seek the self, one must first have a clear idea of what one is looking for. Thus, some meditation manuals advise actively cultivating the sense of self, despite the fact that this sense is...

I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the...

It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not ‘one thing in my life’ – not even the most important – because my life no longer belongs to me because…you are...

who are youreally?you are not a nameor a height, or a weightor a genderyou are not an ageand you are not where you are fromyou are your favorite booksand the songs stuck in your headyou...

Shouldn’t we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs?

I’m getting stale. I always do this time of year. I keep my nose to the grindestone and put in long hours and rustle up good meals and do all the chores and run errands...

when love comes without a clue – it comes to shake all our identity from our root.

Through others we become ourselves.

Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy...

I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the...

A name represents identity, a deep feeling and holds tremendous significance to its owner.

She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without...

Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?

Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too....

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005]

My sense is that her identity has been so associated with the morning news format that it will be difficult for her to make that transition and have the same kind of dominance that she...

There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn’t me. I’m no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that.