Tunde Adebimpe Quotes

I happen to be a 64-year-old woman who lives in Manhattan, so on and so forth, but am I the sum total of my sort of bodily coordinates? Well, of course not.

I've never, ever labeled myself.

Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we've celebrated by giving it a real name. My self.

When you don't inherit an identity you have to define it on your own.

Tennis is great, but it doesn't necessarily define me.

Many are so preoccupied with what others think it defines their existence. When we fixate externally, it keeps us from truly knowing ourselves and our destiny. Most [people] fear looking inward for worry they won't find greatness, but when you stop allowing others to define your worth, you'll see—greatness exists in us all, waiting to be
 expressed

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.

Being fearless means busting down those walls of fear and being who you are, not who someone else thinks you are. People like to put others in a box and tell them what they can and cannot do or who they can and cannot be. No one can tell you who you are and what you are made of, only you yourself know what you are made of, and only you yourself can do the work to become who you want to be.

When I take a role I wonder how I can use it to find out who I really am. I don't think I'm so rare a person.

Every decision you make - every decision that you make every second - is not a decision about what to do, it is a decision about who you are. Every act is an act of self-definition.

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

But I am more than a name. More than they tell me

Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.

You cannot really be too concerned with what people think of you. You're on your own adventure of growth and discovery. So it's not always good to be who people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well ... which is easily done, because then you don't have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

There's a problem which is when you're trapped in your own identity and everything is really you, then you feel less freedom to sort of explore who you want to be. So I think it's kind of something we're stuck with as long as humans are the way we are.

Every act is an act of self definition.

I think it is very useful to know ourselves, but when we start naming and labeling, that is dangerous, that gets problematic. It negates that things are always changing. Besides, it's hard to pin a label onto something that's always moving.

First you have to know who you are. That is the most important thing, as if you don't know who you are you will either get swallowed up or you follow some unsuitable trends and just become a nonentity.

We're constantly being told what other people think we are, and that's why it is so important to know yourself.

That’s what we were told—stand up for yourself. But that’s hard to do if you don’t know who you are.

Before you find out who you are, you have to figure out who you aren't.

I'm trying to know who I am and be honest about it.

My self encompasses a lot of different things.

I have lived life enough to know that I define myself.