“I came and went in the midst of the naked truth. I am not a man of peculiar and exceptional traits. I recognise myself in everybody. I have the same desires, the same longings as the ordinary human being.”

— Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: Turn where you will, everywhere, the man and the woman ever confronting each other, the man who loves a hundred times, the woman who has the power to love so much and to forget so much. I went on my way again. I came and went in the midst of the naked truth. I am not a man of peculiar and exceptional traits. I recognise myself in everybody. I have the same desires, the same longings as the ordinary human being. Like everybody else I am a copy of the truth spelled out in the Room, which is, "I am alone and I want what I have not and what I shall never have." It is by this need that people live, and by this need that people die.

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Henri Barbusse 197

French novelist 1873–1935

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala book Heat and Dust

Heat and Dust, Chapter 1

“I was born in the island of Ireland. I have Irish traits in me - we don't all have the traits of what came from Scotland, there is the celtic factor… and I am an Irishman because you cannot be an Ulsterman without being an Irishman.”

Ian Paisley (1926–2014) Politician and former church minister

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/union/fcchap2.htm

“Tired,
above all,
of being always with myself,
of finding myself everyday,
when the dream comes to an end,
wherever I am,
with the same old nose
and with the same old legs.”

Oliverio Girondo (1891–1967) Argentinian writer

Persuadión de los días, ‘Cansancio’ (‘Fatigue’), 1942, Quoted in Chamber's Dictionary of Quotations, p. 358
Poetry

“I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of — I am, however young, writing at random — straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness — without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to George and Georgiana Keats (March 19, 1819)
Letters (1817–1820)

“I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don't believe that any more. There's myself and there's my song, which I hope is everybody's song.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Interview by Hubert Saal, "Dylan is Back," Newsweek (26 February 1968)

“For as long as I can remember, I have always had the feeling of not quite fitting in, not being the same as everyone else.”

Jane Green (1968) British writer

Source: Summer Secrets

“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man’s imagination.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

“I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many — myself and humanity in flux.”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

Autobiography of Values (1978)
Context: I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many — myself and humanity in flux. I extend a multiple of ways in experience in space. I am myself now, lying on my back in the jungle grass, passing through the ether between satellites and stars. My aging body transmits an ageless life stream. Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.

“I don’t want to become more famous because I don’t have any privacy anymore and I hate that very much. Outside of work I just want to be an ordinary person, not to be recognised, not a monkey on the street when everybody is looking at you.”

Tony Leung (1962) Hong Kong actor

"Lust, Caution – Tony Leung interview" (2007) https://tonyleung.info/tony/?p=237

“I came and went in the midst of the naked truth. I am not a man of peculiar and exceptional traits. I recognise myself in everybody. I have the same desires, the same longings as the ordinary human being.”

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Henri Barbusse 197

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