Selected identity quotes

1. I am a simple Buddhist monk - no more, no less.

2. Don't compare me with Jesus. He is a great master, a great master...

3. If I say, 'I am a monk.' or 'I am a Buddhist,' these are, in comparison to my nature as a human being, temporary. To be human is basic.

4. What has changed is that my life then was less difficult and my future seemingly less gloomy, but as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of thinking is concerned, that has not changed. But if there has indeed been a change, then it is that I think, believe and love more seriously now what I thought, believed and loved even then.

5. I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

6. I wish they would only take me as I am.

7. The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.

8. What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

9. Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

10. I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.

11. This pride of race is a quality which the German, fundamentally, does not possess. The reason for this is that for these last three centuries the country has been torn by internal dissension and religious wars and has been subjected to a variety of foreign influences, to the influence, for example, of Christianity-for Christianity is not a natural religion for the Germans, but a religion that has been imported and which strikes no responsive chord in their hearts and is foreign to the inherent genius of the race. (13th February 1945)

12. I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

13. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

14. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

15. Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

16. A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

17. I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

18. I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

19. Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? ... Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.

20. We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

21. I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.

22. The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.

23. I don't think that we necessarily lie. I mean, we make our living by pretending that we're someone else. I don't tell tall tales. I always tell the truth.

24. There is a splendour in my name hidden and glorious, as the sun of midnight is ever the son.

25. In my life, I don't need to have my face plastered everywhere. It's not really something I want.

26. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

27. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

28. I am a deeply superficial person.

29. I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

30. If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

31. Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.

32. Acting is not pretending or lying. It's finding a side of yourself that's the character and ignoring your other sides. And there's a side of me that wonders what's wrong with being completely honest.

33. Man is the nobler growth our realms supply, And souls are ripened in our northern sky.

34. Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde!

35. Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men's treasures are not yours.

36. Once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.

37. To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation.

38. We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

39. You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

40. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.

41. Great acting is being able to create a character. Great character is being able to be yourself.

42. If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'.

43. Canada is either an idea or it does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just north of a great empire.

44. How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

45. This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.

46. I am not a Christian artist, I am an artist who is a Christian.

47. A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there.

48. Reform Jews are the children of Conservative Jews, or as they are sometimes known, Christians with curlier hair.

49. No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

50. My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

51. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.

52. A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

53. Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

54. A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

55. A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

56. A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

57. What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.

58. Everything is what you make of it, even yourself.

59. Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.

60. Stay crunchy, even in milk.

61. I have been guilty of watching Westerns without acknowledging that Native Americans have gone through the same madness as African Americans. Isn't it extraordinary that sometimes the most offended have not seen others being offended?

62. There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

63. LSD lets you in on something. When you're tripping, the idea of race disappears; the idea of sex disappears; you don't even know what species you are sometimes. And I don't know of anybody who hasn't come back from that being more humane, more thoughtful, more understanding.

64. The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths.

65. I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.

66. I'm too young for Medicare and too old for women to care.

67. Yes, I'm a Judeo-Christian. Jesus and Moses are in my heart, and... both of them were independents, by the way.

68. If I think of all those homosexuals in Germany today, I think I'd hand my German passport back, if I had one.

69. I wish I'd never been an actor. I'd rather have been a streetwalker, selling my body, than selling my tears and my laughter, my grief and my joy.

70. Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S.

71. They say a woman's place Is to wait and serve Under the veil Submissive and dear But I think my place Is in a ship from space To carry me The hell out of here.

72. A person likes to think of himself in a certain way, and when something happens that makes that no longer possible, you mourn the old self. The person you thought you were.

73. A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.

74. As soon as the love relationship does not lead me to me, as soon as I in a love relationship do not lead another person to himself, this love, even if it seems to be the most secure and ecstatic attachment I have ever experienced, is not true love. For real love is dedicated to continual becoming.

75. The hardest battle you're ever going to fight is the battle to be just you.

76. The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.

77. I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they'd be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today's identical twins.

78. It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

79. My father was often angry when I was most like him.

80. Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

81. Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

82. My home is not a place, it is people.

83. It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.

84. What you are is a question only you can answer.

85. I awoke one morning and found myself famous.

86. I was a woman before I was an abolitionist. I must speak for the women.

87. I am a proud staunch Sanatani Hindu.

88. I have been known as a crank, faddist, madman. Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to myself cranks, faddists, and madmen.

89. Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.

90. Yes I am, I am also a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew.

91. Everybody has to be somebody to somebody to be anybody.

92. I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

93. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

94. We are Republicans. But we are Americans first. It is as Americans that we express our concern with the growing confusion that threatens the security and stability of our country.

95. The only thing that was sort of Asian [as a role model] was Hello Kitty. I don't want to model myself after Hello Kitty. She has no mouth.

96. Be what you would seem to be.

97. Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.

98. We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.

99. Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.

100. You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.