Identity Shaping Quotes

Don’t worry about what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.

Character isn't something you were born with and can't change, like your fingerprints. It's something you weren't born with and must take responsibility for forming.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

I think the lack of automatically feeling, 'Yes, the future is going to be like the present' - that is very much a Jewish thing.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

Custom, law bent my first years to the religion of the happy Muslims. I see it too clearly: the care taken of our childhood forms our feelings, our habits, our belief. By the Ganges I would have been a slave of the false gods, a Christian in Paris, a Muslim here.

The man molds the idol and then the idol molds the man.

I feel like a quote out of context, withholding the rest so I can be for you what you want to see.

He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime.

Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us.

I'm a gay man who came from the last years of illegality. That focused my whole character. I think it focused everyone's character in a way. You saw yourself as outside of the main structure.

Culture does not make people. People make culture.

We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

Nowadays, you form your beliefs to fit your behavior, not the other way around.

As children, we look up to people, for better or worse, and see them as the standard for how we should act and identify ourselves.

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

I am whatever you make me, nothing more.

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be

Social media is awesome because I can somewhat paint myself the way I want people to see me.

We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

A woman can be anything the man who loves her would have her be.

I don't think a young person ever really quite knows what's going on when their norm becomes going to the grocery store with sunglasses on at 11 years old. It's kind of weird, and I'll say it also went to my head the first little season, because that became normal for me.

Your past always leads to who you are.