William James Quotes

I'm one of a kind even though I am a twin.

If you can't pigeon-hole yourself, who can you pigeon-hole?

I don't know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, it's very difficult to find.

I'm not Miley Cyrus. There may be some similarities, but I'm my own person.

I'm just like you, only I'm different because I'm me.

I don't know if I feel like an outsider or an insider; I just feel like I always did. I don't have one of those stories where I felt like no one understood me.

I couldn't put into a capsule one thing that represents me, I don't think.

Everybody is in a hurry to decode you in a certain way, and then they expect you to adhere to their definition. How can they possibly do that when you yourself are finding it hard to discover yourself?

We wear a lot of labels in our lives, and it's so very easy to be defined by them. We have grown somehow accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a size eight or a size fourteen, as a capricorn or a taurus, as single or in love.

I know that I am very much like everybody else, but not really.

We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

Mostly, nothing's really changed. I'm still the dorky nerd that I always was.

What I've been conscious of, from the beginning is that I can't be Jil Sander.

Ultimately, I'm not so sure that, as a person, I'm all that interesting.

I knew Henry Fonda was my father, but I didn't know who I was. They all thought of me as Henry Fonda's son. Unfortunately for them, they never got to know me.

Never categorize yourself, society does that to you, don't do it to yourself.

Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.

For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.

Call me Ildar! Call me Abra-ca-da-bra! My name is my name.