Identity Quotes
Most popular identity quotes
We are so many selves ... the person we were last year, wanted to be yesterday, tried to become in one job or in one winter, in one love affair or even in one house where even now, we can close our eyes and smell the rooms.
When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
To have one's individuality completely ignored is like being pushed quite out of life. Like being blown out as one blows out a light.
When I was young I often wondered how I appeared to people around me, but I never thought to see myself in relation to the entire world.
I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want.
I am America. I am the part you won't recognise, but get used to me. Black, confident, cocky. My name, not yours. My religion, not yours. My goals, my own. Get used to me.
Cassius Clay is a slave name. I didn't choose it, and I didn't want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name - it means beloved of God - and I insist people use it when speaking to me and of me.
I believe in Allah and in peace. I don't try to move into white neighborhoods. I don't want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was twelve, but I didn't know what I was doing. I'm not a Christian anymore. I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be...I'm free to be what I want.
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.
One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas—and you have to work through it all.
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.
To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.
The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable. I would not have thee believe in what I say nor trust in what I do — for my words are naught but thy own thoughts in sound and my deeds thy own hopes in action.
