Identification Quotes

“I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”
― Tennessee Williams

“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“In projecting onto others their own moral sense, therapists sometimes make terrible errors. Child physical abusers are automatically labeled “impulsive," despite extensive evidence that they are not necessarily impulsive but more often make thinking errors that justify the assaults. Sexual and physical offenders who profess to be remorseful after they are caught are automatically assumed to be sincere. After all, the therapist would feel terrible if he or she did such a thing. It makes perfect sense that the offender would regret abusing a child. People routinely listen to their own moral sense and assume that others share it.
Thus, those who are malevolent attack others as being malevolent, as engaging in dirty tricks, as being “in it for the money,“ and those who are well meaning assume others are too, and keep arguing logically, keep producing more studies, keep expecting an academic debate, all the time assuming that the issue at hand is the truth of the matter.
Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998 p122”
― Anna Salter

“When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer. 'If that is possible,' we say to ourselves, 'then everything is possible'; a new phase in the history of human awareness has been opened up, just as it opened up when people first read Dante, or first heard Bach's 48 preludes and fugues, or first learned from Hamlet and King Lear(/I> that the complexities and contradictions of human nature could be spelled out on the stage.

This being so, it is a great exasperation to come face to face with new art and not make anything of it. Stared down by something that we don't like, don't understand and can't believe in, we feel personally affronted, as if our identity as reasonably alert and responsive human beings had been called into question. We ought to be having a good time, and we aren't. More than that, an important part of life is being withheld from us; for if any one thing is certain in this world it is that art is there to help us live, and for no other reason.”
― John Russell, The Meaning of Modern Art, Vol. 3: History as Nightmare

“The feeling was less like chemical intoxication than being drunk on life. Spinning round and round, he experienced absolute bliss— unadulterated and unconfined—in which he transcended his own personality and became one with everything he perceived.”
― Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening

“You can tell almost as much about a person by what kinds of books they haven't read as you can by those that they have.”
― Michael E. Weil

“All identification is for control and ownership.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“It's goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can't be sure.'

'That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help,' I said.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“You know that when a police officer refuses to produce formal identification on request, they are probably engaging in some form of corruption.”
― Steven Magee

“What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the separate, detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the thing-in-itself - not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately passionate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthless thing which everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambigiuous phyiscal universe.”
― Douglas Adams

“Press conference [on the movie Carrington] yielded the usual crop of daftness. I've been asked if I related personally to Carrington's tortured relationship with sex and replied that no, not really, I'd had a very pleasant time since I was fifteen. This elicited very disapproving copy from the Brits ... No wonder people think we don't have sex in England.”
― Emma Thompson, The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film

“Freddy believes if a fridge falls off a minivan, you better swerve out of the way; I believe that it is the fridge’s job to swerve out of mine.”
― Frank Underwood

“Ego is the complete identification with form. Physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“Identity was just a box people liked to put themselves in, a mast to tether to in a storm, a security blanket.”
― Leonardo Donofrio, Old Country

“Race, let's remember, is a social invention and a cultural identification, not a biological reality.”
― Victoria E. Bynum

“It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.”
― Amanda Craig, Love in Idleness

“The Fall, a time when the illusion of the Maya fades away, a freedom from the identification with the illusory persona. For as the trees let go of their leaves to embrace the new season each year, there is no need to fight the shadows that form the illusion or the masks that form our egoic personas, but rather enjoy the illusion for what it is and find the freedom to accept and play a role outside of identification.”
― Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache

“The battle is a collision of power, of gods themselves: man is only a pawn in these terrible games, or their scene, or their medium; but man's greatness consists precisely in his act of becoming such medium. By this act he becomes imbued with a soul and identical with the powers.”
― Karl Jaspers, Tragedy is not enough

“Our hero’s reflect a projection of our deepest selves.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Low-grade pain can be so rooted in your being that the pain begins to look like you, and you begin to look like the pain — it becomes your identity.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“You know that when a group of utility workers are withholding their customer service identification cards, they are likely engaging in some form of illegal activity at your home.”
― Steven Magee

“If you want to identify the purpose of a thing, only its creator can provide you the answer”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Identify the sequence of stages that leads to turning your dreams into reality”
― Sunday Adelaja

“A monkey's mind is curious. So we can treasure that; as we are curious too....

Yet meanwhile by simply releasing all attachment or identification to the monkey's chattering we ten merge into the Great Eternal Peace of the All which is One...”
― Leland Lewis, Angel Stories. Angelic Tales of the Universe. Tales 1 through 6.

“What is a woman?
Her brothers' sister, her father's daughter,
Her husband's wife, her children's mother”
― David Elliott, Voices

“An image resists explanation. You relate to it or you do not. You cannot disagree with an image. Through identification with an image you comprehend a totality, rather than learn particular facts.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“The history of cruelty inflicted in the name of morals has convinced me that the increase of identification might achieve what moralizing cannot: beautiful actions.”
― Arne Næss

“Leaders identify skill, potential, and creativity to perform complex assignments”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“I always obtain the business cards of all police officers I have interacted with.”
― Steven Magee