Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.

I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

I came to realize, along with being attracted to girls, I had similar feelings for boys. All the people close to me have known for years who I am. Yet it took time to embrace that other part of who I always was.

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

I wish that I wasn't such an odd mixture. I wish I was serious, but I do love high heels and romantic comedies: being in them and watching them.

Basically, we are a whole world of people desperately trying to figure out what is the dark side of our natures and how much can we explore without becoming something else.

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused.

I would say that playing this character has caused me to think about a lot of things. He's always questioning himself and trying to get back to something he lost touch with and trying to find forgiveness. Everybody struggles with these things to some extent in their life.

I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one's nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.

The man I am will always raise a protest against the man I wanted to be and the two will live together to the end, but the man I wanted to be will be the one on whom judgement will be passed.

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.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

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?'

Every fight is personal, but with myself.

But I miss the woman I was, even as I learn to accept the new creature I’ve become.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

What are we taking from people and what do we give is a life-long struggle, I think, for most of us. Who are we? Do we like who we are? Do we know who we are? Do we care? Does anyone care? That's such a big topic. I could tackle that in many movies. So could other people.

The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worst part of oneself.

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.

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

The price that has to be paid for finding truly personal life is a very high one. It is a price in terms of the acceptance of responsibility. And the awareness of responsibility inevitably leads either to despair or to confession and grace.

All through the night, she battled herself. Or battled to know herself. She fell apart and then put herself back together and then she fell apart again and put herself back together, over and over.