Identity Quotes

“Such as we are made of, such we be.”

“Adult males are what their moms designed them.”

“The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.”

“We must be our own before we can be another's.”

“We go to Europe to be Americanized.”

“But also the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like can onlybe known by like. The reason why he knows about them is, that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of the thing.”

“A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.”

“Discuss unto me: art thou officer, Or art thou base, common, and popular?”

“Examine well your blood.”

“Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.”

“You never know how you look through other people's eyes.”

“I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.”

“He that commends me to mine own content Commends me to the thing I cannot get. I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself: So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.”

“Simply the thing that I am shall make me live.”

“Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tiedoes not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.”

“You are constantly invited to be what you are.”

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

“No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.”

“A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.”

“Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait.”

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

“Be as thou wast wont to be.See as thou wast wont to see.”

“Every true man's apparel fits your thief.”

“One man in his time plays many parts.”