258 quotes
“It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.”
"You may think I’m small, but I have a universe inside my mind."
— Yoko Ono
"What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self."
— Thomas Mann
"This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it."
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
"I have been a stranger here in my own land: All my life"
— Sophocles
"You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity."
— Philip K. Dick
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth"
— Oscar Wilde
"You are unique and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost."
— Martha Graham
"More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one."
— Margaret Atwood
"A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming."
— Madeleine L'Engle
"The hardest battle you are ever going to have to fight is the battle to be just you."
— Leo Buscaglia
"It's our actions that define us. What we choose. What we resist. What we're willing to die for."
— Karen Marie Moning
"Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are."
— José Saramago
"We are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors."
— Jorge Luis Borges
"Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are."
— José Ortega y Gasset
"I am I plus my circumstances."
"I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror"
"The human being is single, unique, and unrepeatable, someone thought of and chosen from eternity, someone called and identified by name"
— Pope John Paul II
"Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere."
— Jhumpa Lahiri
"One may understand the cosmos but never the ego the self is more distant than any star."
— Gilbert Chesterton
"Are you a devil?""I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart."
— G.K. Chesterton