William James Quotes

You can't get along in society without an identity.

I am, it seems, interested in people with multiple identities. I think we all have multiple identities.

I've always tried to figure out what people think of themselves and what they think they're projecting.

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

Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.

You think you know who you are, and then other people have these other ideas.

We're all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don't spend any time, or think they don't, on preparing themselves for the world out there - I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.

The thing of it is though that's the only way people know you, they see you in that roll and they see you in person and they only know the perception of what you are.

People see me as Andre first. Then they see me as someone who happens to be a Muslim.

For the better part of my adult life, I proudly avoided nerd/nimrod/goober status. I was always just cool enough.

The perception of identity is so intimately bound up with the perception of the human form.

Identity is an assemblage of constellations.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

We all have our own ideas of who we are that may or may not be justified, and you can really find out a heck of a lot more accurately from the people around an individual.

Funny how defined we are by how we present ourselves to the world.

I don't know that any of us can control our own image. We are what other people see.

The thing that keeps me being a performer is my interest in society's obsession with identity, because I'm not sure that I really believe identity exists.

I distinctly remember being very young, sixth grade maybe, and being at a party and hearing the mothers discuss the children. And the mothers said, 'Well, it's very clear who's the leader in the group.' And they were talking about me!

I think, in a lot of ways, we underestimate how much clothing plays a part in achieving our identities and in how we want the world to deal with us.

When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his category and attributes, his 'social identity' - to use a term that is better than 'social status' because personal attributes such as 'honesty' are involved, as well as structural ones, like 'occupation.'

Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.

The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

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.

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

When I walk out into the street or go to the toilet, I don't think of myself as being black. Of course, other people think of me as black when I walk into a pub. Obviously being black is a part of me.