Quotes about Identity

Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain.

Our values often reflect the beliefs of our cultural background. From childhood we develop a value system that represents a combination of cultural influences, personal discoveries, and family scripts. These become the "glasses" through which we look at the world. We evaluate, assign priorities, judge, and behave based on how we see life through these glasses

We knew that social comparison motives were out of harmony with our deeper values and could lead to conditional love and eventually to our son's lessened sense of self-worth. So we determined to focus our efforts on us—not on our techniques, but on our deepest motives and our perception of him. Instead of trying to change him, we tried to stand apart—to separate us from him—and to sense his identity, individuality, separateness, and worth.

True love is found in the affirmation of another person's identity and stewardship, in seeking his or her growth and good, not on interpreting all the other person's responses in terms of one's own needs, hungers, or desires.

People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.

Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you'll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, "What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

Things can hurt us physically or economically and can cause sorrow. But our character, our basic identity, does not have to be hurt at all.

Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are.

Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose

We are not our feelings. We are not our moods. We are not even our thoughts. The very fact that we can think about these things separates us from them and from the animal world.

our son's "socially impressive" accomplishments were more a serendipitous expression of the feelings he had about himself than merely a response to social reward.

If our sense of emotional worth comes primarily from our marriage, then we become highly dependent upon that relationship.