Identity Quotes · MoveMe Quotes

For if you don’t, what are you doing?

Sumuel Ullman Quote on Living Young Regardless of Age and How Age Really is Just a Number

“Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”
Samuel Ullman, Youth

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Forget about your age already. Who cares what your number is? Why live your life according to the number of times you’ve traveled around the sun? Once you’ve reached adulthood, that number of sun revolutions is arbitrary. 25 Times? 40 Times? 60 Times? What of it?

“How can anyone feel complete when they only ever accept a fraction of themselves?”
Leslie Ralph, Tiny Buddha

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Many people try and fill the “holes” in their lives with another person. The “holes” being fears, doubts, insecurities, and traumas that might have been a part of their past that leave them feeling un-whole. Like parts of them are missing. Like there are voids that they can’t quite figure out or understand. Like only “half” of a person who needs another “half” to feel completed. But, there are two problems with this way of thinking.

20 Thomas Moore Quotes from Original Self on Life, Fulfillment, and Identity

Excerpt: Learn how to strip away everything that is covering, distracting, and blocking what Thomas Moore might consider to be… your Original Self.

“The whole effort of the spiritual process is to break the boundaries you have drawn for yourself and experience the immensity that you are. The aim is to unshackle yourself from the limited identity you have forged, as a result of your own ignorance, and live the way the Creator made you—utterly blissful and infinitely responsible.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 67)

Get it?

If you fake it until you make it, beware:

“All kinds of strange things happened to shape you as you were growing up. Your parents pushed you. Or they ignored you. Your mother was overinvolved. Or your father was underinvolved. Your older sister was bossy. Or your younger brother was bratty. Your family had too much money. Or not enough money. But none of these things that happened to you are you. Otherwise you and I would be nothing more than the pretzels fate twisted us into when the dough of the self was still soft.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 149)

“We never lose the good parts of ourselves we really care about. All the parts of yourself you’re wanting to put back in your life are there waiting for you. The pain you feel comes from the way these missing parts of yourself slowly choke from lack of oxygen when they’re buried. All you have to do is identify what’s really missing. Then make sure you find room for it in your life.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 111)

Rumi Quote on Living in the Heart and How The Words That Follow “I Am” Follow You.

“As you live deeper in the heart, the mirror gets clearer and clearer.”
Rumi

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Once it happened where a presenter was having technical difficulties with his presentation. The projector wasn’t connecting to the computer properly and the slideshow that he prepared wouldn’t show. As the time was ticking off the clock for his allotted slot, he decided to spontaneously fill the time with an exercise. He asked everybody to turn to the person next to them and ask them to finish the following statement: “I am…”

“Who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, and more essential even than what you do.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 202)

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But, isn’t what we say and what we do, who we are? Sure, our words and actions are key indicators of our identity, but what Tolle points out as being even more important is the intention behind the words and actions. It’s in how we say what we say and in how we do what we do that makes all of the difference. This is a crucial understanding because therefore, it’s the how that points us to understanding who we are.

“If the whole world was blind, how many people would you impress?”
Unknown

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As it stands, the world is predominantly vision based. Meaning, most of what we interpret from our worlds—our environments—is absorbed from what we see. Less of what we learn is from hearing and less from that is tasting, smelling, and feeling. And because most of us rely on vision, vision becomes the predominant method for hierarchically organizing our world. In other words, we organize our world into “desirable” and “less desirable” based on what we see more than any other sense, because sight is our primary source of information gathering.

“To be honest, speak without identity.”
Naval Ravikant, Medium

Jiawei Han Quote on Expectations and How To Separate The Person From The Idea Of The Person

“You just like the idea of me. You like the person I present myself under circumstances that I can control. I choose what I say and how I say things. It’s like being attracted to a fictional character in a book. They are scripted and made up. If you think about it, through writings, we all script and make ourselves up. I don’t share the person I become when I am upset. I don’t show you how I look like when I sleep. I don’t tell you about all the times I’ve made someone cry. All the guilty things I’ve done and the bad thoughts I’ve had.”
Jiawei Han

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And so is all too often the case in today’s world. Who are we really falling in love with? Who are we idolizing and emulating? Who are we really putting on a pedestal? Is it really the person or is it really just the idea of the person? More often than not, after careful introspection, you’ll find that many people in our lives are really just a product of ideas that represent idealistic and unrealistic images of the people we wished for them to be. We don’t see them for who they are, we see them as a projection from our mind—and perception is reality.

“The struggles along the way are only meant to shape you for your purpose.”
Chadwick Boseman

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Chadwick Boseman, the iconic “Black Panther” star, has died at age 43 after a 4-year battle with colon cancer. He was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016, battled it until it progressed to stage IV, and up until it ended up taking his life here in 2020. And like so many others, I knew nothing about his cancer or that he was even sick at all.

“There was so much in my life I cared about—and of course I really loved being a therapist. But on another level there wasn’t anything in it I wanted just for me. It was as if my life had turned into a motel room and the truth was I could walk out of it without any sense that I was leaving anything of my own behind. A stranger could easily move into my life, and nothing would be different. I was happy as long as I didn’t think about who I was and what I really wanted for myself.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 44)

Be real about who you are.

On Being “Cool” and On Being a “Dork” and Why We Get These Ideas Backwards As A Society

For anyone that wants to go above and beyond, this article might hit better if you do the following before reading:

Make a list of the Top 3 reasons why you might consider yourself to be, “Cool”
Make a list of the Top 3 reasons why you might consider yourself to be a, “Dork”

That is all. Once you finish with those two lists, continue below. Or, if you’re in a hurry and choose not to make the lists, feel free to continue below anyway.

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John Joseph Powell Quote on Self-Worth and How Interactions Are A Mirror For What’s Within

“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.”
John Joseph Powell, The Secret of Staying in Love

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Mirrors allow us to see our external self. Human interaction allows us to see our internal self. Without mirrors, we wouldn’t be able to truly know how we looked. We can get a sense of how we look and we might be able to guess, but it is only through the reflection of a mirror that we can ever be sure. Without human interaction, how might we ever truly grasp the content of our character?