Charles Taylor Quotes

It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.

Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.

A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.

I think people who struggle to define themselves might never be satisfied because there is no definition. Living with responsibility is important, but I don't really think you have to grow up.

I'm right at a time when I'm strongly finding my identity inside of my work.

When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go on, we come to find that we become our parents.

Carving out an identity for yourself is important so I'm trying to do that as well.

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'

When you have a lot of people telling you what you are and perceiving you in a certain way, it's difficult to find your own identity.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

One of the things my parents taught me, and I'll always be grateful as a gift, is to not ever let anybody else define me; that for me to define myself. and I think that helped me a lot in assuming a leadership position.

I know, for a fact, that I'm a very different person on my own than I am with someone else. We are different with each other. These things are constantly adjusted. And that's true of humans. That's not just true of famous people.

When we're growing up and being teenagers, oftentimes you try so hard to define yourself. You try to create an image of yourself because you don't really know who you are yet. And that can be kind of limiting because you forget that there are actually so many different sides of identity. And it's important to recognize that everyone is completely different.

I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later.

I was a personality before I became a person.

The years between leaving school and actually becoming an adult are very important years. You make a lot of choices as to the type of life you want to lead and what type of person you want to be. There were so many people who had opinions of me, a lot of them very unflattering, that it was hard to make up my mind about who I was supposed to be.

Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

By the time we left college, I had become my own image: a dandelion in the flower bed of society. Kinda cute, but still a weed.

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.

Now, as I move through my fifties, I can be professional and domestic, creative and intellectual, patient and urgent. I have learned that we should never settle for someone else's definition of who we can be. Growing to this age, I realize, is kind of like feeling your voice deepen. It's still your voice, but it has more substance, and it sounds like it knows its own origins.

You can come from a family of actors, and sometimes there have been families that grow you up as an actor, but this wasn't my situation. It's very important to find your own way because it's something you then have to confront yourself. You're not going to be asking your parents.

I'm so happy after such a long struggle to be living my true self.