#entity

Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#identity #kundera #love

Sometimes we fight who we are, struggling against ourselves and our natures. But we must learn to accept who we are and appreciate who we become. We must love ourselves for what and who we are, and believe in our talents. ↗

— Harley King

#appreciation #belief #character #identity #love

Dani said this woman, with whom she’d lived for two years, had never known her. “I feel like people accept the first thing I show them,” she said, “and that’s all I ever am to them. ↗

— Mary Gaitskill

#love #love

Ladies, no matter how hard you try, a man will never complete you. Only God can. And if you don’t know your identity in Him, you’ll be lost forever. ↗

— Deborah N. Kabwang

#identity #lost #love #lust #love

Are you what others say and think you are?  Or are you who you are regardless of what others say and think? ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#identity #richelle #richelle-goodrich #self-esteem #self-worth

[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number. ↗

— Jean Améry

#jewish-identity #shoah #holocaust

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#transformation #love

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives." [Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010] ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#culture #identity #reading #self-awareness #self-awareness

To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand. ↗

— Charles Taylor

#self #self-identity #self-determination

Live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone... Scripture suggests that the essence of the divine nature is compassion and that the heart of God is defined by tenderness. ↗

— Brennan Manning

#gentleness #god #identity #love #self