Quotes about Identity

If I were not a Jew I would be a Quaker.

There is far too great a disproportion between what one is and what others think one is, or at least what they say they think one is.

A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like France or England, to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something to say and the power to say it -- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make use of the power. If there was some different way of writing...Or else something else to write about.

After all, what is an individual?

For I am you and you are I.

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.

I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price?

It is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, and sometime criminal ways that are so characteristically human.

Having the freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.

Don't call us saints, we don't want to be dismissed that easily.

Radicalism was thriving among all groups except the Catholics. I felt out of it all. There was Catholic membership in all these groups of course, but no Catholic leadership.