Alfred Korzybski Quotes

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

I am myself a fabulous fake.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

I'm as vain as the next guy. I have a facade on right now. But you can't see it, because it's reality-based.

I have to live in the truth that this is who I am. That's what I need to focus on.

Dandyism is a lie which reveals the truth, and the truth is that we are what we pretend to be.

There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn't investigated. They might find that I don't really exist - that I'm just a hologram.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.

I know what my identity is.

People forget who they are; they always remain with an identity which is not the real self. It is just a projected self which does not exist, but they identify with this projected self appearance.

I don't like the idea of having a public image. In the end, you have an image of someone, which becomes true whether it is or not.

The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else.

We are born perfect, and we will die perfect. The problem is that we create that character in our story that we pretend to be, or that we want to be, and we cannot hide that from ourselves. We know that we are pretending to be what we are not in the name of perfection.

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

I have no issues with my identity.

In a way, you kind of get caught up in whatever image of yourself you think is out there.

Once I looked into a mirror at my face I felt like it was completely convincing. I was Salieri.

I can't stand outside myself and be anybody else.

I'm always interested in how people, myself included, have ideas of themselves, of how they thought they would be, or of how they want to be seen. And the older you get, the world keeps telling you different things about yourself. And how people either adjust to those things and let go of adolescent notions. Or they dig in deeper.

People have different impressions of themselves, and where reality lies is somewhere in between.