personal development on Mistaken Identity

Clouseau: Does your dog bite? Hotel Clerk: No. Clouseau: [bowing down to pet the dog] Nice doggie. [Dog barks and bites Clouseau on the hand] Clouseau: I thought you said your dog did not bite! H...

When I was in college I sometimes visited Bel Air Presbyterian Church, as did many of my friends. At that time Bel Air was known for being a place celebrities liked to visit. (This was not my favorite...

Have you ever mistaken a person for someone else? I remember being at a party with my best friend in high school. We had just arrived when we saw our friend Nicole standing in the corner having a good...

Why am I me?

The great mistake made by most of the Lord’s people is in hoping to discover in themselves that which is to be found in Christ alone.

“It is a comfort not to be mistaken at all points."

Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.

It’s a wild and wonderful thing to bump into someone and realize it’s you.

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn’t explain away afterwards.

“My mistakes are my life.” How It Is

This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone...

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?

Computers give rise to many amusing salutations that could also offend. Humorous examples include the legendary Mr. Obe, a fine old West African name that didn’t happen to belong to the recipient (OBE...

I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday.

The false self plays its deceptive role, ostensibly protecting us but doing so in a way that is programmed to keep us fearful—of being abandoned, losing support, not being able to cope on our own, not...

Our selves are fashioned; we are adorned with histories that incline us to saunter, swagger, or shuffle. Given our histories, some of us move through the world with a cape; some of us don baggy sweate...

Mistakes were quite possibly made by the administrations in which I served.

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

A professional carpet-layer stepped back to admire his customary flawless work. While surveying the installed carpet, he reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette and realized the pack was missing....

If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is pos...

If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.

In her aptly title book, Being Wrong , Kathleen Schulz describes just how difficult it is to be wrong: A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the ti...

There is not any thing, relating to men and characters, more surprising and unaccountable, than this partiality to themselves. . . . Hence it is that many men seem perfect strangers to their own chara...

I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le...

A stumble may prevent a fall.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask, “Where have I gone wrong?” Then a voice says, “This is going to take more than one night.”

It is not strange... to mistake change for progress.

To err is human; to admit it, superhuman.