Charles Taylor Quotes

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

I know what my identity is.

Language is our way of communicating what we want and who we are.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

We have to really educate ourselves in a way about who we are, what our real identity is.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

I have always felt that I am the sum total of my parts.

I should not have to prove my ethnicity to anyone. I know who I am.

I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you.

And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.

What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.

Myself, first of all, I am a Jew. And that is the most important thing for me.

I try not to define myself. Other people are going to do that for you anyway.

Do not let where you come from define you, but never forget the values you learned from your close community.

It's important that people understand who I am and where I come from and not just have it shaped by purely political discourse.

I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our sense of who we are and yet elusive, ever-changing, fragmentary. One way to look at this is to say that, therefore, we ourselves are elusive, ever-changing and fragmentary to ourselves.

Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.

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.

I was trying to establish an identity in music, and black and white had nothing to do with it.

I don't have a set image. In fact, I would be curious to know how someone slots me.

Then, at some point, you get identified with certain things.

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge.