Truth × Identity

Truth and Identity

Browse 26 quotations catalogued under truth with "identity" in the text or topic label.

26 quotes

This collection contains 26 quotations filed under Truth with "identity" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Truth and Identity; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Daniel Dennett, John S. Hall, Jim Henson, Max Beckmann, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "he Capgras delusion a bizarre affliction that occasionally strikes human beings who have suffered brain damage. The defining mark of the Capgras delusion is th…" The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "Some of the work has a genuine feeling behind it. Some of it is probably just being funny for the sake of being funny. Obviously, there are…" Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Truth quotes or the concept page for Identity.

26 Quotes on Truth and Identity

"he Capgras delusion a bizarre affliction that occasionally strikes human beings who have suffered brain damage. The defining mark of the Capgras delusion is the sufferer's conviction that a close acquaintance has been replaced by an impostor who looks like the genuine companion, who has mysteriously disappeared! … What is particularly surprising about these cases is that they don't depend on subtle disguises and fleeting glimpses. On the contrary, the delusion persists even when the target individual is closely scrutinized by the , and is even pleading for recognition. Capgras sufferers have been known to murder their spouses, so sure are they that these look-alike interlopers are trying to step into their shoes — into whole lives — that are not rightfully theirs! There can be no doubt that in such a sad case, the in question has deemed true some very specific proposition of nonidentity: This man is not my husband; this man is a qualitatively similar to my husband as ever can be, and yet he is not my husband. Of particular interest to us is the fact that people suffering from such a delusion can be quite unable to say why they are so sure."

— Daniel Dennett

"Some of the work has a genuine feeling behind it. Some of it is probably just being funny for the sake of being funny. Obviously, there are elements to "Detachable " about male identity that are there, but not really overtly there. For the person who wants to find it, it's there. I don't know. I don't think... I like to think I'm not obvious about the humor, and I'm not obvious about the feelings, either. There's a certain degree of subtlety to what I'm doing; even in very obvious things, there's something underneath that's interesting. I think guilty of being clever at times, to the detriment of conveying something more important, more real, more honest. I'll cop to that. But I will also say that there's also stuff that does have meaning."

— John S. Hall

"His faith in humanity began from an acknowledgement of limitation, not an illusion about perfectibility. He knew that joy flowed from honesty, rather than around it—sound familiar? In a similar way, Christians, whose identity is found apart from our ever-changing and often hopeless abilities and attributes, are free to laugh at ourselves. This is part and parcel of Christian joy."

"What is important to me in my work is the identity that is hidden behind so-called reality. I search for a bridge from the given present tot the invisible, rather as a famous cabalist once said, 'If you wish to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible'."

— Max Beckmann

"As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried."

"The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality."

— Mircea Eliade

"I am admittedly insecure about my racial identity, an attitude that has much improved since my younger days when I absolutely abhorred it. Any attention paid to me being different was incredibly shameful...but the mirrors became too much...what a disappointing reality check!"

— Margaret Cho

"An essential element in forming a single electorate is the sense that in the last resort all parts of it stand, or fall, survive or perish, together. This sense the British do not share with the inhabitants of the continent of Western Europe. Of all the nations of Europe Britain and Russia alone, though for opposite reasons, have this in common: they can be defeated in the decisive land battle and still survive. This characteristic Russia owes to her immensity. Britain owes it to her ditch. The British feel – and I believe that instinct corresponds with sound military reason – that the ditch is as significant in what we call the nuclear age as it proved to be in the air age and had been in the age of the Grande Armée of Napoleon or the Spanish infantry of Philip II. Error or truth, myth or reality, the belief itself is a habit of mind which has helped to form the national identity of the British and cannot be divorced from it."

— Enoch Powell

"Reality is simply the loss of ego. Destroy the ego by seeking its identity. Because the ego is no entity it will automatically vanish and reality will shine forth by itself."

— Ramana Maharshi

"The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching is that if we take the trouble to recognize the independent existence of the inner worlds of thought, and keep the mind turned in that direction, we shall soon become increasingly conscious of their reality. We are not, as Sartre believed, stranded in the universe of matter like a whale on a beach. That inner world is our natural home. Moreover, once we grasp this truth, we can also recognize that we ourselves possess an "essential ego," a "true self," a fundamental identity that goes far beyond our usual feeble sense of being "me."

— Colin Wilson

"Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well... the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter."

— Johannes Grenzfurthner

"Tookie’s Mistaken Identity; On the trail of the real founder of the Crips", L.A. Weekly"

— Stanley Williams

"Franco failed. He came up against the Gibraltarians and he lost. And everyone who has come after him has failed. The only thing his steel gates attracted was rust. But the last siege of Gibraltar forged the iron will of the people of Rock. It sealed our separate and distinct identity. It gave shape to our modern reality. Now anyone who attempts our economic strangulation, our forced subjugation is on notice that they too will fail."

— Fabian Picardo

"If you look for an identity you find inequality. If you look for similarities you separate one truth from another."

— Giannina Braschi

"Solidarity is not a matter of sentiment but a fact, cold and impassive as the granite foundations of a skyscraper. If the basic elements, identity of interest, clarity of vision, honesty of intent, and oneness of purpose, or any of these is lacking, all sentimental pleas for solidarity, and all other efforts to achieve it will be barren of results."

— Eugene V. Debs

"Art is not simply an identity of illusion and reality, but a counter-illusion: its world is a material world, but the material of an intelligible spiritual world."

— Northrop Frye

"The identity of Deep Throat is modern journalism's greatest unsolved mystery. It has been said that he may be the most famous anonymous person in U.S. history. But, regardless of his notoriety, American society today owes a considerable debt to the government official who decided, at great personal risk, to help Woodward and Bernstein as they pursued the hidden truths of Watergate."

— W. Mark Felt

"We have a lot of things that define who we are from where we come from and as filmmakers we need to be true to our identity."

— Usama Mukwaya

"I do not believe that the President was in any way directly involved in the leaking of her identity, but that was a very disillusioning moment for me when I found out when it initially hit the press, and I was in North Carolina, if I remember correctly, and a reporter shouted out to the President, "Is it true that you authorized the secret leaking of this classified information?" We walked onto Air Force One, and the Presidents asks, "What was the reporter asking?", and I said, "He asserted that you were the one who authorized Scooty Libby leaking this information," and he said, "Yeah, I did."

— Scott McClellan

"Something is beautiful if it is honest. If you do an engaged piece of work, which is sincere, the concept of beauty meets the concept of truth. So no illusive harmony. I try to reach people who strive for truth, for identity. Although these conceptions are incredibly warn out, one must try to find the way back to these simple conceptions."

— Jörg Immendorff

"Boxing is a space in which our repressed feelings, our fears and our identity anxieties all converge. Boxing resolves everything in the sense of death. It manages to do so because it is a primal display; a manifestation of an unrepeatable existential experience, a ‘true’ reality; the revelation of an internal world in which not only the body and the flesh are on the line, but also the intellect, the spirit and so-called ‘culture.’ It is a cruel spectacle made of pain and love, of the unpredictable and the serious, of boredom and great emotions."

— Gabriele Tinti (poet)

"It seems to me that untold histories that come from a very pure place of suffering and survival contain truth. Everything else is subject to question, really. Anything that comes to us through an official source—especially an official source attached to a national or religious agenda, or any of those other identity politics that seem to bedevil the world at the moment—is questioned. I felt that the voices I was hearing, the places from which these stories came to me, were genuine and, therefore, very precious. The stories in themselves contained both the questions and the answers about identity, or about what borders do to people and how they survive."

— Kapka Kassabova

"The vision for Europe needs to renew its commitment to true subsidiarity. Having structures of economic, political and social relationships that liberate subsidiarity will make accepting complexity more realistic. It seems to me that current debates about what Europe is have fallen into the trap of equating strength and unity with simplicity. As I have just said, the opposite seems to be true. Attempts to explain European structures and identity with a single overarching story have ended in failure because they have not allowed sufficient flexibility for these structures to be lived out below the continental level."

— Justin Welby

"There seem to two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish , and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify themselves with the ego, by realising its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being."

"Symbolically, Ganesha represents the basic unity of the macrocosm and microcosm, the immense being and the individual being . This highly implausible identity is however a fundamental reality and the key to all mystic or ritual experience as well as to Yogic possibilities. Without being aware of Ganesha, and without worshipping him, no accomplishment is possible."

— Alain Daniélou

"CAPM also makes use of what is called a "definitional identity." This is something that is automatically true, simply because of the way things have been defined."

— Robert Haugen

Key thinkers on this theme

Daniel Dennett· Philosophy John S. Hall· Literature Jim Henson· Music Max Beckmann· Art Bob Dylan· Music

Related ideas in Truth

All Truth quotes Explore the idea of Identity