#identity

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures. ↗

— Christian Smith

#human-nature #humanism #identity #personalism #personhood

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing? ↗

— Charles Yu

#hearts #identity #lies #mirrors #sense

No matter the nature of your individuality, you can nurture a better identity and have a mature positively rewarding life. ↗

— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

#lifecoaching #mature #nature #nurture #personal-development

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are? -Richard ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#identity #life #life

Are you going to wolf out and eat me now?" "Certainly not, you'd be stringy and hard to digest." "But kosher." "I'll be sure to point any Jewish lycanthropes in your direction. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#kosher-foods #teasing #food

New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people. ↗

— Anne Rice

#life #family

Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
 your heart must forget about shame
 and dignity. You are God's lover,
 yet you worry what people are saying. ↗

— Rumi

#identity #love #rumi #shame #love

We are each what never leaves us, what we never see the back of is the self. But what loves us is at the back, as Eurydice was escorting him out without his knowing. ↗

— Christina Davis

#love #poetry #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