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Self Identity Quotes

Browse 137 quotes about Self Identity.

Self Identity Quotes

“The human mind’s innate ability to imagine and create ensures that we never remain stalled out in who we are. We constantly seek to amend our circumference and circumstances, craft and redraft our emotional, social, political, economic, and artistic being.”

MindSelfChangeImaginationIdentityPersonalityTransformationSelf AwarenessArtisticHuman MindArtistsMetamorphosisSelf Awareness QuotesSelf IdentityIdentity CrisisPersonality DevelopmentTransformation QuotesSelf Creation
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.”

PhilosophyMetaphysicsSelf Identity
Book:Star Maker
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“Human history is the ancient story of the umbilical conflict between a lone individual versus a cabalistic society. A love-hate relationship defines our personal history with society, where the suppression of individuality for the sake of the collective good battles the notion that the purpose of society is to enable each person to flourish. A conspicuous feature of cultural development involves societies teaching children the sublimation of unacceptable impulses or idealizations, consciously to transform their inappropriate instinctual impulses into socially acceptable actions or behavior. The paradox rest in the concept that in order for any person to flourish they must preserve the spiritual texture of themselves, a process that requires the individual to resist societal restraint, push off against the community, and reject the walls of traditionalism that seek to pen us in. The climatic defining event in a person’s life represents the liberation of the self from crippling conformism, staunchly rebuffing capitulating to the whimsy of the super ego of society.”

IndividualSocietyIdentityPersonalitySelf AwarenessIndependencePersonal GrowthInstinctIndividualityPersonal DevelopmentSelf RealizationLiberationImpulseSelf AcceptanceIndividualismSelf DeterminationSelf DevelopmentLove HateRejectingSelf ActualizationImpulsiveSelf IdentityPersonality DevelopmentSelf Determination QuotesLove Hate RelationshipPersonal LibertyPersonality QuotesImpulse ControlTraditionalismConformingImpulsivenessImpulsivityInstinctiveConformity And AttitudeSuper EgoLove Hate Quotes
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“hunger lust drives many personalities to stand out from the crowd. Members of the new generation seek celebrity status regardless of the cost. We have each engaged in or witnessed someone else’s feeble attempts to define their personal strand of uniqueness derived through acquisitions, nationalism, body piercings, serving as rabid fans of various conglomeration’s sports teams, or by participating in other cult-like activities. Fervently engaging in these or similar misguided identity markers is laughable. Our real identity marker comes from engagement in a succession of character building experiences that integrate the conscious and unconscious mind into a coherent whole. A person defines the contours of their life through a series of life affirming actions, many of which choices initially seem disjointed from any functional significance beyond meeting the needs of our immediate family and mollifying our own selfishness. Akin to silent film actors of yesteryear, we must each play some worthwhile role in the symposium of life which staccato orchestra of spring beauty embraces every nook and cranny of planet Earth.”

SelfPersonalityFameUniquenessSelf ExpressionCelebritySelf IdentitySelf IdentificationPurpose Of Life Meaningful Life
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.”

Human NatureEmotionalSadQuietDespairSelf AwarenessHappyLoudMelancholyCynicalSkepticismSelf KnowledgeSkepticalPredictableSkepticInconsistentMirthCynicInconsistencySelf IdentityPsycheCruelPredictabilityTenderReliableBoisterousHuman Nature QuotesConflicting EmotionsBawdyHu Nature Quote
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Now I did not say to you that I don't believe at all!' he finally shouted. 'I'm letting you know, purely and simply, that I'm an unhappy, boring book and nothing more, for the time being, for the time being. But let my name perish! You're what ... we're discussing, not me... I am a man without talent, and all I can do is spill my blood and nothing more, like any man without talent. Let my blood perish as well!”

PhilosophySufferingBeliefEmotionalDespairMortalityExistentialIntrospectionLiterarySelf Identity
Book:Demons
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“Personal action including common feats of labor, work, and performance of private and public deeds create our world. The construction of a self-identity necessitates speech (logos), since a person must declare his or her unique existence defined by their collective actions. A ballpoint pen using invisible ink writes a person’s destiny. The instrument of our outcome is composed of many minor incidences that forge an evolving character, which ultimate visage only manifests its final form after years of seemingly surreptitious assembly.”

WorkPersonalitySpeechLaborDeedsPersonal DevelopmentAccomplishmentsSelf ImageSelf IdentityPersonality Development
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Humankind’s greatest gift is that we are indeterminate beings. Unlike the tough and leathery seed of an acorn, which will grow into a magnificent oak tree, none of us has a predetermined final configuration of our ultimate essence. Our mental temperament is pliable. We make conscious and subconscious choices that govern who we become.”

HumanityHuman NaturePersonalityPersonal GrowthPersonal DevelopmentSelf DeterminationSelf DevelopmentSelf ImageSelf IdentitySelf Determination Quotes
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“People exercise the freedom to present themselves from a vast array of precepts. The modern human mind can engage in reflective thought and selectively determine how to organize the elements of perception. We can consciously elect to depart from stereotypical behavior and transcend the heretofore-established biological behavioral preferences. People can elect to hold prejudices or not, can make rational or irrational decisions to engage in war or not, and can take deliberate steps to arrest destruction of the ecosystem or not. Holding ourselves in check by placing a brake upon the human propensity to strike out in instinctual behavior is a distinct human quality. Restraint from instant gratification of strong impulses represents a unique human behavior trait. By intentionally refraining from committing an instinctual action, humankind asserts its sovereignty from its biological constitution. Unbound from the limitations of its biological nature, a person can employ the mind to devise alternative behavioral choices and the results of numerous behavioral choices culminate to provide a person with a sophisticated definition of the self.”

ThinkingChoicesHuman NatureIdentitySelf ImprovementInstinctSelf DeterminationSelf ControlThinking QuotesSelf IdentityChoices QuotesInstinctsHuman Nature QuotesInstinctive
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“However, research with activists in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s and of those who sheltered Holocaust survivors during World War II confirm that compassion, empathy, and social responsibility were core family values that motivated their actions. Once exercised in action, values of social responsibility and service to others may become integral to identity.”

CompassionEmpathyHolocaustSocial ResponsibilitySelf Identity
Book:Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification
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“Self-identity depends upon our manner of apprehending the world. Life for me is primarily about distilling patterns, attempting to sift between the ordinary and extraordinary events of daily of life in order to weave a mosaic that defines and clarifies the reasons behind why and how I live.”

SelfIdentityMemoirSelf RealizationSelf DeterminationWriters On WritingMemoir WritingSelf IdentityWriters On ThinkingWriting Memoir
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“We must engage our sense of self to sensibly deal with environmental stresses in the ever-changing world. Without a strong sense of self and an equally robust ego, I might have expired long ago. Because I possess a brain that is capable of self-recognition and self-regulation, I reserve the opportunity to edit personal behavior. If I can exercise the necessary self-discipline, I can reposition an individualistic and egotistical sense of self-identity. A sense of self can lock us into self-destructive behavioral patterns. If we exhibit an inflexible sense of self, we are predisposed to act in a rigidly prescribed manner. Some of our personal decisions might not support our long-term best interest. The Neanderthals failed to adapt to environmental changes and paid the ultimate price with extermination of their species. I too face the challenge of either adapting to environmental stresses or expiring. My prior characterization of self-identity did not serve me well since it brought me to the brink of self-immolation. Accordingly, I must revise whom I think I am in order to adapt to the challenges of a rapidly changing environment by assessing who I was, determining who I want to become, and developing a disciplined approach to make the transition from what I was to who I seek to become.”

SelfTransformationSelf AwarenessSelf DeterminationTranscendenceSelf IdentityPersonal TransformationSelfhoodSelf RecognitionSelf Identification
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“We determine who we are during all acts of survival. Self-identity is an ongoing process of self-exploration and development of strength of character. Human pain is unavoidable. A person finds their immaculate core floating amongst the rubble of ruined dreams and imploded fantasies. With strength of mind and time tested character, a prudent person begins recasting a person’s quixotic outlook upon life into mature philosophy that will gird them against all the heartaches and tragedies of an earthly life.”

SelfTransformationSelf AwarenessSelf DeterminationSelf TransformationSelf IdentitySelf TranscendenceSelfhoodSelf RecognitionSelf Identification
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Our evolving self-concept guides our daily actions, organizes our information processing, and fosters a stout mental predisposition that assists our ego maintain a fibrous self-image. Self-concept is not restricted to a bare assessment of what role we presently fulfill in society. Our self-image is an endogenous alloy that includes an agglomeration of past selves and possible future selves. Future selves or ‘possible selves’ represent a person’s ideas of what they might become, what they aspire to become, and what they are afraid of becoming.”

SelfIdentitySelf AwarenessSelf RealizationSelf DeterminationSelf ImageSelf IdentitySelf ConceptFuture Self
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Our emotional valence – positive or negative experiences – affects not only how we narrate childhood events, but also which memories we retain. The interplay between a person encountering environment experiences meshed with self-editing of various aspects of their complex memory system results in a person becoming more than a collection of memories: a person creates their personalized version of a self. A person integrates many experiences into creating their being. Personal encounters with other people as well as moments of personal solitude contemplating ideas and personal existence congeal to form the depiction of a self.”

SelfMemoriesMemoirSelf ImageMemoir WritingChildhood MemoriesSelf IdentitySelf Concept
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Some prejudices and fallacies of the human mind are understandable on a theoretical basis, but practically impossible to implement. As matters now stand, I have little choice but to recognize myself as possessing a personal state of conscious awareness and presupposing that my active state of mental awareness constitutes a personal identity. Acknowledgement of my ignorance begins with the opening admission that the concept of a self delineates the most that I will ever understand in life. Although it might be a spectacular illusion to perceive the self as the unchanging nucleus at the center of my being, from a human evolutionary standpoint and to develop and carryout strategies necessary for personal survival it is a useful illusion. Belief in a self allows a person to integrate streams of information and resolve conflicts between competing values and goals. Absence of a self-identity and devoid of the specific goal of seeking personal self-realization, would not only jeopardize human survival on a daily bases, but it would render life utterly meaningless, making a person’s ontological existence a triviality. Lacking a philosophical status of fundamental ontological event, human life would be a windowless absurdity. A person must perceive oneself as an actual entity in physical Minkowski space, not merely as a philosophical concept in order to engage in the necessary activities to perpetuate personal existence and import meaning to personal efforts. Accordingly, I elect to perceive the self as an actual entity, not as a mere abstraction, composed of a single, definite set of well-defined ontological criteria. Self-perception guides future behavioral choices, frame intellectual inquires, and the evolution of the self represents the ultimate level of personal achievement in pursuit of my goal of attaining self-realization.”

SelfIdentitySelf AwarenessSelf RealizationSelf Realization QuotesSelf IdentityPersonal IdentitySelfhoodSelf RecognitionSelf Identification
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Our survival responses form a central cord of our emotions. We are receptive, compassionate beings that respond with both body and mind to global stimuli. Our ability to think, learn, and comprehend is closely aligned to the complexity of our lives. People tend to develop the qualities and traits that they need to live. Survival demands that our cognitive abilities and emotional cordage match the challenges presented by our environment. Our capacity to plan correlates directly to our cognitive abilities and the desire to alleviate our present level of anxiety.”

SelfIdentityTransformationSelf RealizationMind PowerTranscendenceSelf TransformationSelf IdentityPersonal TransformationSelf Transcendence
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“The ontogenesis of our conscious self and the concinnity of our shadow spring directly from our seedlings saturated in the rich milieu of our nation’s external and internal conflicts and our personalized social, political, and cultural interactions. We either actively or passively participate in the explosion of culturally significant experiences. We exist in a fish bowl where the aquatic pool of collective experiences influences us. We are each bystanders in the present chapter of history’s bloodbath, standing either as willing or unwilling witnesses to the vertiginous acceleration in violence that rocks the cradle of civilization. We cannot witness blood spilling in the streets and be present in an age of rampant desecration of forest, seas, rivers, tundra, and deserts of this world without holding ourselves accountable for either our activism or passivity. Our acceptance or resistance to the pervasive cultural chauvinism of our age frames us.”

SelfIdentitySocial ChangeSocial IssuesSelf IdentitySocial InteractionCultural HeritageCultural IdentitySocial Influence
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“We build a self-image from stored memories including a swarm of physical and social interactions, evocative emotions, and other associative experiences. Selfhood also comes from the language, symbols, and artifacts, which potent combinations create cultural beliefs. We build a self upon real as well as imaginary experiences. A person’s rational and irrational beliefs forge a sense of self. The books that we read, the music we listen to, the films we watch, and what church or other social gatherings we attend constitute meaningful activities that congeal and work together to shape our sense of identity. Cultural determinants drive how we work, play, worship, and raise our children. Culture has its own sources of reinforcement that can influence members of society to adopt an interdependent, communal sense of self, or an independent, individualistic sense of self. Culture is not fate, but none of us is immune from the great octopus of culture; its tentacles touch us every direction that we turn. Our self-identity is subtlety influenced by the prevailing political-social culture as well as affected by our perceived social status, economic or otherwise.”

SelfCultureMemoriesIdentityPersonalitySelf ImageSelf IdentityCulture IdentitySelfhood
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents' definition of me. They had defined me early on, coined me like a word they have translated on some mysterious hieroglyph, and I had spent my life coming to terms with that specious coinage. My parents had succeeded in making me a stranger to myself. They had turned me into the exact image of what they needed at the time, and because there was something essentially complaisant and orthodox in my nature, I allowed them to knead and shape me into the smooth lineaments of their nonpareil child.”

LoveGrowing UpParentsSelf Identity
Book:The Prince of Tides
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“Narrative nonfiction is an act of conception and construction; it is formation of a personal legend from the mist of memory using mental hydraulics plied with the tools of logic, structure, design, and imagination. An engaged mind possesses a documentary sensibility that fabricates a memoirist identity, which alliance mollifies their bleak interior critic. A conscientious mind hews a residue of meaning from the verisimilitude of a person’s metafictional baggage. A basic impulse of all free people is to speak to an appreciative audience. Writing the story of our life constitutes asserting the universal human right to declare and define who we are. When we write our story, we become a stakeholder of our place in the world, we affirm the right to shape our future, and avow the verity to heal our torn souls.”

Self DiscoverySelf DeterminationWriters On WritingJourney Of LifeMemoir WritingSelf IdentityStory Of Your LifeStory Of Life
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.”

ThinkingWritingLanguageIdentitySelf AwarenessSelf DiscoveryMemoirAuthenticitySelf DeterminationAutobiographyMind PowerWriting ProcessMemoir WritingSelf IdentitySelf UnderstandingPersonal EssaysEssay WritingPersonal EssayNarrative IdentityNarrative Non Fiction
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Self-image is the product of our very own spin machine. Revolutions of long-term memories and the gyrations of short-term thoughts fabricate the epicycle of our present self-image. Once a synchronized self-image is developed, the human mind exhibits a tenacious tendency to maintain that centralized self-image through selective recall of prior events and by displaying a corresponding perception bias in interpreting present day experiences. In short, once we come to a firm belief of what we are, we exercise various mental and emotional prejudices to confirm and sustain our self-image.”

IdentityMindsetSelf DeterminationMind PowerSelf ImageSelf TransformationSelf IdentitySelf ConceptPersonal IdentityPersonal Image
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Free will and the choices that we make every day provides for self-identification. We all hold the plenary powers of discretion to script who and what we are. Self-determination comes from refusal to passively accept whatever doctrine is convenient and move beyond glib answers and popular canons to staunch the torrent of life’s abuses. Intensely pushing forward into troubled waters the clear becomes murky, the certain become problematic, and the real become ethereal. Striping our consciousness of all familiar handholds can lead to dissolution of the sense of a transient self. Disintegration of a preconceived notion of self-identity can lead to either psychosis or a degree of self-mastery, depending upon an individual’s ability to absorb and integrate the secret reserves of their psyche power. Self-awareness comes at a high price but it has distinct rewards. Shrewdly shredded of all falsities we can see what is apparent. Brusquely scouring our brain of layers of toxic emotional sludge reveals a sterling center point. Starting anew we can launch ourselves in a more charming and cheerful image that is both natural and necessary to build upon in order to achieve and sustain our robust constitutional fortitude.”

ChoicesIdentityDeterminationFree WillSelf DeterminationLife ChoicesChoices And ConsequencesSelf IdentityFree Will QuotesSelf Directed
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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