Quotes About Identity

The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.

I was examining what religious identity meant in Africa. Along the edge of the Islamic world, what patterns were shaping identity? And the truth is, when I looked at the rise of violent forms of religion, no single identity was prevalent. It's central to note that in Nigeria, that tree is rooted primarily in Christianity. It's not just Islamic militants in the Middle Belt.

You create identity, you're not given identity per se. What became more and more interesting to me wasn't the I, it was text because it's text that create identity. That's how I got interested in plagiarism.

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

I'm just challenging white supremacy at its intellectual heart every day. It's a pedagogy that I deploy against some of the most vicious resistance to blackness that whiteness is able to throw up. I engage in a lot of intellectual combat with supremacists and with the predicate of white supremacy and white indifference to black identity, and brown and red and yellow identity too, for that matter.

It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors.

The Negro wants to be everything but himself... He wants to integrate with the white man, but he cannot integrate with himself or with his own kind. The Negro wants to lose his identity because he does not know his own identity.

We, black British, were searching - as the first generation that was born and raised here - for our own identity. We already knew what the Caribbean thing was about. We grew up with the racial tension and unrest. They were either touching your head for good luck or kicking you down the stairs for being too dark. But that was part and parcel of how we grew up in London. But in terms of our identity, it was more about us claiming it y'know?

More platform-sensitive generations will make distinctions between online and in-person intimacy, whereas fourteen-year-olds have very nuanced online selves and might embody their virtual identity in the physical, analogue version of themselves. They have a much more pluralistic understanding of the self. I don't think we'd be here now in this amazing sexual and gender revolution without the online space where young people can see and share other versions of identity and sexuality.

Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity; that is indeed the "negative" way of characterizing African American identity.

I've always been interested in how fast-moving our identity is and that I've never been able to pin down who I truly am. That inspires me to write, because I feel like that cements me a bit, in that I find my identity in being an artist.

Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.

"Spiritual teacher" of course is not an identity. "Spiritual teacher" is a function. Somebody comes, the teaching happens. Somebody leaves, there's no spiritual teacher left.

I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can.

Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us. And we are not what we have. We are the beloved daughters and sons of God.

Taste, like identity, has value only when there are differences.

That's why 'The Bourne Identity' has that sort of shaky style, because for the most part, Matt Damon and I were sneaking around Paris and shooting where we didn't have permits.

We are dominated by everything with which our self is identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves. The normal mistake we all make is to identify ourselves with some content of consciousness rather than with consciousness itself. Some people get their identity from their feelings, others from their thoughts, others from their social roles. But this identification with a part of the personality destroys the freedom which comes from the experience of the pure “I”.

Each human needs to find his or her timeless and formless essence identity

We live in a world where great incompatibles co-exist: the human scale and the superhuman scale, stability and mobility, permanence and change, identity and anonymity, comprehensibility and universality.

Identity is a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow.

When our identity comes from the self, then we keep our energy to ourselves. We feel energetic, we feel powerful, and we experience youthful vigor.

You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.

I don't know what art is exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's not something you get paid to do. For myself this is a job. I think it's easier to get better at it if you don't lose your identity in it. You do whatever you can to try to understand the character. Because they're paying you feel like you should be doing something.

It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.

Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.

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.

My first guiding principle is this: willing and active co-operation between independent sovereign states. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.

So when I was about 13 or 14, I realized I was attracted to women and then made the assumption that I was a lesbian, and didn't realize that that wasn't the case. It was the fact that I was a man and a heterosexual man. The issue wasn't my sexual orientation, but rather my gender identity.

Everyone has an identity crisis when they are 16 or 17 years old.

I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.

When we talk about feminism - equality without apology for ALL - we can't be talking about for all white women or all highly educated women but all women, regardless of color, class, creed, sexual orientation or identity.

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

Issues of the economy are profoundly affected by how you live out sexual orientation and gender identity.

For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.

When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.

...Iknow the bitter fact that most lives are incredibly wasted, that opportunities for developing identity, for receiving pleasure, for achieving a sense of self-worth are limited and, not only underdeveloped, but in most cases not developed at all--because no one thinks that a housewife, or a mother, or a typist has anything to develop.

[A]n important new book. . . . Professor Akerlof and Rachel Kranton have invented Identity Economics.

I think every person has their own identity and beauty. Everyone being different is what is really beautiful. If we were all the same, it would be boring.

With the world in turmoil and doubt, the American people, faithful to the values that have always defined America's identity, have expressed with force their faith in progress and the future. At a time when we must face huge challenges together, your election has raised enormous hope in France, in Europe and beyond.

My identity is mostly as a songwriter and lyricist and singer. I also have a lot of production ideas but I have my own limitations in terms of what instruments I'm actually proficient at and what I can do myself, so I really love working with people on the production end; just really going for it with orchestration and instrumentation and production. That's where I see myself going: maintaining my integrity and abilities as a songwriter, but applying it to different contexts, to where I can put on a huge feathered costume and roll around in the ocean.

Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts.

Those who know don't talk. Those who talk don't know. Close your mouth, block off your senses, blunt your sharpness, untie your knots, soften your glare, settle your dust. This is the primal identity. Be like the Tao. It can't be approached or withdrawn from, benefited or harmed, honored or brought into disgrace. It gives itself up continually. That is why it endures.

I haven't made art about Israel. There's a covert subtext of Jewish identity in my artwork.

Are we all clear that we want to build something that can aspire to be a world power? In other words, not just a trading bloc but a political entity. Do we realise that our nation states, taken individually, would find it far more difficult to assert their existence and their identity on the world stage.

I wouldn't have ever travelled so many of the wrong roads if I really knew God and who He really was too me and to the world. My identity would have been rooted in the truth of who He created me to be instead of rooted in figuring out who I was in all the wrong places and with many of the wrong people; especially guys.