Existential Identity Quotes

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow the world.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

In streams of light I clearly saw The dust you seldom see, Out of which the Nameless makes A Name for one like me... All busy in the sunlight The flecks did float and dance, And I was tumbled up with them In formless circumstance.

In the end, we are not the roles we play. We are the light that animates every soul in the dance we call life.

To be and to think are one and the same for us.

I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved". Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.

You want to be a citizen of the world, and then life happens, and you forget to be a citizen of the world; you're a citizen of your own existence.

By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

The crocodile must want to be a crocodile for reasons of the crocodile

When we look up at the night sky and wonder, 'Is there anyone else out there?' we're also asking who we are in relation to them.

Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.

Then what am I - the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.