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. I mean I like to be passionate and sincere but I also like to have fun and act like a dork. Geeks unite.

42. I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn't.

43. Moscow... how many strains are fusing in that one sound, for Russian hearts! what store of riches it imparts!

44. To be deep in history is to cease to be protestant.

45. All in all is all we are.

46. I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes.

47. Help yourself, then God will also help you! The German people was created by Providence, not in order to obey a law which suits Englishmen or Frenchmen, but to stand up for its vital right. That is what we are there for!

48. In the Spanish people there is a mixture of Gothic, Frankish and Moorish blood. One can speak of the Spaniard as one would speak of a brave anarachist. The Arabian epoch - the Arabs look down on the Turks as they do on dogs - was the most cultured, the most intellectual and in every way best and happiest epoch in Spanish history. It was followed by the period of the persecutions with its unceasing atrocities.

49. Don't you get the idea I'm one of those god damn radicals. Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system.

50. Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description--an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations.

51. There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.

52. If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.

53. In that daily effort in which intelligence mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.

54. By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, today in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be represented as a bete noire, the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English! (To The Times (London), November 28, 1919, quoted in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice, 2005, ISBN 0-691-12075-7)

55. If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music... I do know that that I get most joy in life out of my violin.

56. I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.

57. I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'.

58. So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet - inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted. Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?

59. He must have known me had he seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognise me by my face.

60. Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!

61. I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing - his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his 'rightful' position in his society. Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks t attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

62. Danforth: Do you mean to deny this confession when you are free? Proctor: I mean to deny nothing! Danforth: Then explain to me, Mr. Proctor, why you will not let - Proctor: [With the cry of his whole soul] Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

63. Always be a first rate version of yourself.

64. The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

65. I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and ofttimes disagreeable... I suppose I'm larger than life.

66. Cherish forever what makes you unique, 'cuz you're a real yawn if it goes!

67. I don't have prejudice against myself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

68. I object to being called a chess genius because I consider myself to be an all around genius who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he's like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing.

69. They constantly use the words eccentric, eccentric, eccentric, weird. I am boring. I am boring!

70. The point is doing of them rather than the accomplishments. There is no actor but the action; there is no experiencer but the experience.

71. Etre un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux.

72. Rubin, I am not of your world. I've spent all my life in prison. When I was a child I was an orphan and too ugly to be adopted. Now I am too beautiful to be set free.

73. Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone (Michael Moore) who actually embodies all of those qualities.

74. When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul. [5]

75. It seems to me that the real clue to your sex orientation lies in your romantic feelings rather than in your sexual feelings. If you are really gay, you are able to fall in love with a man, not just enjoy having sex with him.

76. Voltaire was not the first or last man to convert a prison into a hall of fame. A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind. It was while in prison that he changed his name from the one his father gave him - Arouet - to the one he has made famous throughout all time - Voltaire. He said, 'I was very unlucky under my first name. I want to see if this one will succeed any better.'

77. Being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life.

78. Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.

79. A girl in Salt Lake once asked me 'Why are you wearing makeup? Are you a fag?' I then said 'Well, if I'm a fag for wearing makeup, you must be a dyke in blue jeans'. I also informed her that she was just angry because I was prettier than she was.

80. It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about 'old and other times' as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory. When you're young, you're still 'becoming', now at my age I am more concerned with 'being'. And not too long from now I'll be driven by 'surviving', I'm sure. I kind of miss that 'becoming' stage, as most times you really don't know what's around the corner. Now, of course, I've kind of knocked on the door and heard a muffled answer. Nevertheless, I still don't know what the voice is saying, or even what language it's in.

81. I re-invented my image so many times that I'm in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman. (During a spoof segment on 'Late Night with Conan O'Brien'.)

82. All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.

83. It doesn't matter what you think/who you are/what your name is!

84. I am a being of Heaven and Earth, of thunder and lightning, of rain and wind, of the galaxies, of the suns and the stars and the void through which they travel. The essence of nature, eternal, divine that all men seek to know to hear, known as the great illusion time, and the all-prevailing atmosphere. And now you know my background.

85. He was not merely a chip of the old Block, but the old Block itself.

86. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires - this is a benevolent form. The ideal self expressed in letters is not a crudely sugary affair except in dreary personalities; in any case the ideal is very much a part of the character, having its twenty-four hours a day to get through, and being no less unique in its combinations than one's fingerprints.

87. If we don't want to define ourselves by things as superficial as our appearances, we're stuck with the revolting alternative of being judged by our actions, by what we do.

88. Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the 'free for all.' They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

89. Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.... It is thus with most of us: we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

90. Every intense desire is perhaps basically a desire to be different from what we are. Hence probably the imperiousness of the desire for fame, which is a desire for a self utterly unlike the real self.

91. Friends, we have now won. ...I say to Aymaras, Quechuas, Chiquitaos, and Guaranis: for the first time we [indigenous people] are going to be presidents. And I want to say to businesses, intellectual professionals, and artists: do not abandon us.

92. It was pretty sad, because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.

93. I'm so powerful on stage that I seem to have created a monster. When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man.

94. Undershaft: My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

95. A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. (Preface)

96. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

97. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.

98. They were regular in being gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, they learned many little things that are things in being gay, they were gay every day, they were regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay.

99. Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.

100. In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.