#dent

She was looking for something I could never give her." Again his dark eyes bored into Julia's mind. "You have something of the same about you, young woman. Take my advice: Don't think you will find it in another person. You won't. It's not there. You must find it in yourself. ↗

— Iain Pears

#individuality #search #self-awareness #self-reliance #dreams

I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books. ↗

— Beatrice Sparks

#sense-of-self #identity

If you understood everything I said, you’d be me ↗

— Miles Davis

#understanding #identity

It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!" I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else"--but, oh dear!' cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, 'I do wish they WOULD put their heads down! I am so VERY tired of being all alone here! ↗

— Lewis Carroll

#identity #loneliness #identity

Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#hubris #identity

Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way. ↗

— Mary Roach

#survival #gender

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#contrarianism #dissent #dissidents #free-thought #harold-rosenberg

An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident. ↗

— Francis Thompson

#atheist #believes #himself #man #who

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. ↗

— Patrick Rothfuss

#self-image #sense-of-self #stories #storytelling #story

If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#gossip #secrets #gossip