“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”
William James
“There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Virginia Woolf
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw
“A dreamer is one who can find his way only by moonlight and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Oscar Wilde
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
William Shakespeare
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Oscar Wilde
“To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea what one is.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Self-knowledge is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.”
Simone De Beauvoir
“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.”
Chuck Palahniuk
“A man is what he wills himself to be.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
Carl Jung
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
Oscar Wilde
“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
Ralph Ellison
“We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”
Sigmund Freud
“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.”
Erik Erikson
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
Carl Jung
“How do I know who I am or where I am? How could a single wave locate itself in an ocean?”
Rumi
“To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“The reward for conformity is that everybody likes you except yourself.”
Rita Mae Brown
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
Dr. Seuss
“Folks can change their ways much as they want to. But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.”
James Baldwin
“Identity is this incredible invisible force that controls your whole life. It’s invisible like gravity is invisible, but it controls your whole life.”
Tony Robbins
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
Lao-Tzu
Have any other quotes about identity you’d add to the list? Which is your favorite? Let me know in the comments!
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