#identity

"Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ."

"While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life."

"Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others."

"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."

"I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art."

"I don't care what is written,"Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."

"When I discover who I am, I’ll be free."

"Each person you meetis an aspect of yourself,clamoring for love."

"I’ll wear a maze on a necklace, dangling over my chest, because if you want to get at my heart, you have to be ready to lose yourself."

"Live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone...Scripture suggests that the essence of the divine nature is compassion and that the heart of God is defined by tenderness."

"Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be."

"We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there."

"You know, people ask me. They say 'Dan, three years later do you really want to be drawing cat whiskers on your face?' but they don't understand. The cat whiskers, they come from within."

"First and foremost: a human being. If your definition of yourself is something else; maybe you should reconsider."

"I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate."

"One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else."

"The firmest friendship is based on an identity of likes and dislikes."

"At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down."

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

"I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo."