Quotes about Identity

This segregation has erected denominational walls and impoverished many Christians. Unless you happen to be born into just the right tradition, you're brought up to feed on somebody else's diet.

The truth is, we want to be known; we truly do. But we're afraid. If you see the real me, will you run away? Am I even worth being known? Will the real me bore you? Scare you? Repulse you? And so we hide.

I dress the way I want. I don`t pretend to be someone I`m not.

we have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone and we are not alone when we imitate. It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

Always be yourself. Express yourself, have faith in yourself. Don't go looking for a successful personality and just duplicate it.

And what is it, thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.

For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe.

Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.

It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation.

It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.

Lulled into such an opium-like state of listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of the waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature.

Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.