Internal Identity Quotes

Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.

Before, I thought I was actually fighting for my own self-worth; that is why I so desperately wanted people to like me. I thought their liking me was a comment on me, but it was a comment on them.

My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong.

It's a weird feeling when people are defining you, and you haven't even defined yourself.

I am a black man inside and outside and you are white men on the outside, but inside, you are Africans like me.

I always say I never felt 'latched' to a gender. I just kind of always felt like myself, and I never felt like I had to do certain things or be a certain way to fit into a certain mold.

Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.

We are true to our name. We're somewhat beneath the surface, and I think well always be to a certain extent.

But we are mostly what we are, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve.

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.

I never really address myself to any image anybody has of me. That's like fighting with ghosts.

My age has so little to do with my image of myself because at a certain point, the number just didn't fit how I felt. It has become irrelevant to me. I just don't feel like that number is representative of my spirit, of my energy or my anything!

The people inside the company are the people who define GE, not the people outside the company.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

Often, others see you, as you see yourself

In reality, people are people. Age does a weird thing to your body on the outside. It makes your face fall and weird things happen all over. But inside, you're the same person you always were.

You train all year for the physical aspect of cycling, but you can't plan for what comes next. You're still the same person. External perceptions might change, but inside, you're the same.

I am not caused by my history-my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image.

I got into a brawl one night in a saloon in Greenwich Village. Elia Kazan, a great director, saw me put out a couple of hecklers and figures there was some Big Daddy in me, just lyin' dormant. And out it came. People still do call me Big Daddy, but to me, inside, I'm no Big Daddy at all.

It's not a cis-man becoming a cis-woman. It's a trans person just being who they want to be. This is how I've always felt, and this is who I've always been. But so much focus is put on the transition or the change because it's so visible. But that's not even what it is... That's who that person's been and who they are now.

It's been a challenge for me my whole life in that my insides don't necessarily match my outsides... People try to strike up a conversation with me about Dungeons & Dragons or comic books, and I'm like, 'I can't. I'm sorry.'

it is all the question of identity. ... As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside.

You have to find out who you are aside from what the media say you are. If you've become reliant on them for kind of a sense of self, then you're really screwed.

I grew up in a Hollywood family with money, so money is not the reason I make music. I'm as Hollywood as it gets. Not internally but externally - that's my bloodline.