The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.

The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way.

If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.