Don't let your disease become your identity.

The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.

To be nobody-but-myself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

Our wine is bitter, but it is our wine.

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

The extent and condition of our property, and our choice of style in dwelling, create a powerful emblem of our identity and status.

I read the landscape to help me through, to know what's come before me there, to find my footing in time.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

It matters not what you are thought to be, but what you are.

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?

We wander but in the end there is always a certain peace in being what one is, in being that completely The condemned man has that joy

Some things are as they are regardless of what they were.

To its own impulse every creature stirs; Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers!

Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery.

He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends.

The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

There is no ache more Deadly than the striving to be oneself.