"You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.'Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip."

Identity, Christianity, Trust, Temptation

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"You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.'Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip."

Exlpore more Identity quotes

"She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog."

Stephen King, American Author

Identity, Truth, Emotion, Wisdom, Power

"Who would you impress if the world was blind?"

Shannon L. Alder, American Author

Identity, Truth, Life, Wisdom

"Call me Richard. That's my real name. Call me that."

Stephen King, American Author

Identity, Truth, Today, Power

"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."

David Levithan, American Author

Identity, Connection, Desire, Defiance

"Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that."

David Levithan, American Author

Identity, Love, Complexity, Sexuality

"She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Identity, Appearance, Age, Perception, Time

"But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Identity, Freedom, Snobbery, Detachment

"But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Identity, Absence, Memory, Mind

"We go to Europe to be Americanized."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet

Identity, Europe, Travel, Culture

"She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies."

Jodi Picoult, American Novelist

Identity, Memory, Change, Truth

Explore more quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

"We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits."

Friendship

"People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."

People

"Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad."

People

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it."

Illusion

"Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother."

Mother

"The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties."

Trouble

"I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool."

Values

"At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely."

Party

"Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams."

Truth

"Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other."

Love