Quotes on Who We Are

If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail.

If you look at all the notions we accept about who we are, you find that they are all based upon our perceptual experiences.

Inner peace doesn't come from getting what we want, but from remembering who we are.

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

We need language to tell us who we are, how we feel, what we're capable of- to explain the pains and glory of our existence.

It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.

Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color.... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.

The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.

Authenticity is more than speaking; Authenticity is also about doing. Every decision we make says something about who we are.

We both grew up in the atmosphere of struggle, both Ossie and me, ... I come out of Harlem and Harlem comes out of me - wailing police sirens and street parties, rumors and landlords, that cultural, spiritual scene. And Ossie came up from the South, where struggle and dying were part of everyday life. That is who we are.

The world is a reflection of who we are and if we don't like the reflection, it doesn't really help to break the mirror.

The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.

Your life is a mirror. Life gives us not what we want. Life gives us who we are

It's in the act of making things that we figure out who we are.

What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.

Celebration... is self restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder - the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Movement is my medicine, my meditation, my metaphor and my method, a living language we can rely upon to tell us the truth about who we are, who we are with, and where we are going. There is no dogma in the dance.

And it's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.

Many of us spend our entire lives in the same bubble - we surround ourselves with people who share our opinions, speak the way we speak, and look the way we look. We fear leaving those familiar surroundings, which is natural, but through exploration of the unfamiliar we stop focusing on the labels that define WHAT we are and discover WHO we are.

There has to be a balance, Vin," Elend said. "Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be." He sighed. "But for now," he said, nodding to the side, "we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.