identity on Personality

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living...

Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...

When I engaged with twenty-somethings, for example, who were just entering the adult years, I found them preoccupied with clarifying their identity. What kind of a man or woman am I becoming, they w...

Your desire for more of God than you have right now, your longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation than you have experienced so far is the truest thing about you. You ...

We cannot be true Christians without being original. Nothing gives us personality like prayer. Nothing makes man so original. To be creative, we must live with the Creator. Prayer places man in direct...

In her compelling memoir Still Life , author Gillian Marchenko recounts her struggles with depression. In this excerpt, Marchenko describes one of the many paradoxes that come with depression: how ...

It’s been said that our identity is that which is identical about us in every situation. Identity. Identical. Yet that doesn’t help much because we are composite people, bundles of competing desires a...

You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...

I am not perfect, and I will struggle with the “old Jim,” who was and is influenced by American culture, narratives and values. But the key is that identity comes before behavior. We almost always do ...

I am a human being, not a human doing.

The rise of both video spectacles and marketed consumables is no accidental marriage. Images capture our attention and lure us because they implicitly ask us to try on various costumes of identity, to...

If I am not for myself who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?

Identity drives motivation, motivation drives action, and action drives results. For example, if someone speeds past me at ninety miles per hour on the highway, odds are I won’t chase them down and is...

Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...

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...

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...

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...

One of the characters in popular contemporary novelist Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, Joey Berglund, reflects on life and identity by referring to selfhood as “a collection of contradictory potenti...

A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...

The human being is defined through otherness. It is a being whose identity emerges only in relation to other beings, God, the animals and the rest of creation.

As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will be filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain a...

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.

Quod vitae sectabor iter. Translation: Who do I want to be? And: What path will I take?

Our true identity is to love without fear and insecurity. Our higher potential finds us when we set our course in that direction. The power of love and compassion transforms insecurity.

Pop psychology is wrong when it tells you to look inside yourself and find your value. The magazines are wrong when they suggest you are only as good as you are thin, muscular, pimple-free, or perfume...

The exhausting manipulation and control it takes to protect an identity based on circumstances will crush our hearts and hide the best of who we are behind a wall of insecurity.

A number of years ago I was discipling a young man who had recently been released from the state’s juvenile detention center. As a teenager he had been hooked on drugs, and he had resorted to stealing...

To be nobody-but-yourself—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.