Ruth Benedict Quotes

You have within you many strong and cruel enemies to overcome. You must know that there are still a thousand ties which you must break. No one can tell you what they are; only you can tell by looking at yourself and into your heart.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

I think that most of us can identify with the change that happens to Bruce Banner. We all have a little of both inside us. I think this is an important theme in defining the character.

It's ironic, but until you can free those final monsters within the jungle of yourself, your life, your soul is up for grabs.

Two people live within me. One's a very savvy businessperson; the other's a party girl.

I felt like there were two people inside me. I was trying to be somebody I was not, and I was frustrated that people didn't know who I was.

I felt that just looking at the world in general, there are so many types of people, and some hide who they truly are. And I feel that every person has some kind of warped identity inside them that they decide if they want to show or not.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

There's the person that's the addict, and then there's the person that's who you are.

Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.

The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself - the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us - that's where it's at.

I'm not a fighter, but in my mind I'm fighting every day. 'What's new? What am I doing?' I'm fighting myself. My soul is samurai. My roots aren't samurai, but my soul is.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.

I learned quite early on in life that we are all two people. And one of those people none of us will ever know.

I looked into that empty bottle and I saw myself.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

It's always interesting to see somebody struggling with two different sides of their personality.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

For me, 'Pariah' is very much about that inner churn. It's about this person's emotional inner life, and that's really what I wanted to bring to 'Bessie.'

I did a lot of struggling with my identity trying to figure out who the heck I was. I had to face my demons.

I feel that I fell somewhat under that category where I was using fighting to kind of run from my own self to an extent, to kind of numb the things that I thought about myself. When I had fighting taken away, I was forced to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'What are you without fighting?'

What I discovered is that there has always been a soldier inside me; I just didn't know it.