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Quotes about Being Yourself
...find out what is unique about yourself and get in touch with it. If you are able to be yourself, then you have no competition. All you have to do is to try and get closer and closer to that essence. ~Barbara Cook [In context, this advice is targeted to singers, but oh! how well it applies to us all.
I will not ask that you nor you approve. The wild thyme is itself nor asks consent of rose nor reed. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), My Little Book of Prayer, 1904
The sea is itself: it does not fear to be calm or stormy, gray or gold, loud or soft—
Why have I feared to be like the sea—myself?
~James Oppenheim
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. ~E.E. Cummings, "A Poet's Advice to Students," 1955
Life was short, and he wished to feel comfortable in it. ~Frederick William Robinson, Under the Spell, 1870
A man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1903, George Horace Lorimer, editor
To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. Such a man... may be a man, in short, acting on his own instincts, keeping in his own shape that God made him in; and not a mere crank in the social engine house, welded on principles that he does not understand, and for purposes that he does not care for. ~Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage, 1878 [context: an affection for nautical sports
The privilege of a lifetime
is being who you are.
~Joseph Campbell
God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. ~William Shakespeare, Hamlet, c.1600 [III, 1, Hamlet]
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. ~Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal," 1947
It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. ~Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, 1897, published asDe Profundis, edited by Robert Ross, 1905
If we took as much pains to be what we ought as we do to disguise what we are, we might appear like ourselves, without being at the trouble of any disguise at all. We are so used to disguise ourselves to others, that at last we become disguised even to ourselves. ~François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), Maxims and Moral Reflections, from the French, 1799 edition
I am told to just be myself, but as much as I have practiced the impression, I am still no good at it. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man
Who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
~Homer
...you are you and I am I. ~May Gillington Byron (1861–1936), "The Sword Between," The Wind on the Heath: Ballads and Lyrics, 1911
I am myself, and you are you. Blessed be the day that we accept that. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), My Little Book of Life, 1912
If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.
~Dorothy Parker, "Observation," Enough Rope, 1926
Give up, then, this trying to know all, to embrace all. Learn to limit yourself, to content yourself with some definite thing, and some definite work; dare to be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not, and to believe in your own individuality. Self-distrust is destroying you: trust, surrender, abandon yourself; 'believe and thou shalt be healed.' Unbelief is death, and depression and self-satire are alike unbelief. ~Henri Frédéric Amiel, journal, 1855, translated by Mary Augusta Arnold Ward
I no longer ask the approval of the throng. It is not essential. The violet cannot change its hue, though its heart break. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), My Little Book of Life, 1912
You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. ~Bram Stoker (1847–1912), letter to Walt Whitman, 1872, as quoted in Horace Traubel (1858–1919), With Walt Whitman in Camden,
Once I was the brown wren, but I tell you this brown coat no longer represents me, for I am come in screaming colors. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "Prayers of a Worldling: VII," A Soul's Faring, 1921
My soul in its prison-grey will come forth in the flush of colorful life. It will shed its grey cloak, like a pall. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "A Soul's Faring: XL," A Soul's Faring, 1921
Let your life be pleasing to the multitude, and it can not be so to yourself. ~Publilius Syrus, 1st century BCE, from the Latin by D. Lyman, 1856
Recluse, overheard: "It's one thing to accept who you are, and another thing to appear in public in such a condition." ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
I shall not mind what I am, if I have the courage to nail it to the bulletin board on the public square...
I am not less than the mountain range that stretches away in its infinite line of being, that lifts up its head, confident and without apology.
My life is not less than the stars that come forth in their place at night and shine.
Whatever I do, or am, give me the courage to espouse it. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "A Soul's Faring: LXXXV," A Soul's Faring, 1921
You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. ~Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908
If you try to copy my journey, you will not be following it, for that is not where my journey began. Go on your own journey, wherever it takes you.
Right now, I'm going to eat. My eating will not fill your stomach. ~Barry Fox Stevens (1902–1985), Don't Push the River (it flows by itself), 1970
Sir Robert Chiltern: At heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist?...
Mrs. Cheveley: Oh, I'm neither...
Sir Robert Chiltern: You prefer to be natural?
Mrs. Cheveley: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
~Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1895
Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull of what you really love.
~Rumi (1207–1273), as interpreted by Coleman Barks, 1997, based on a translation by John Moyne
Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true! ~Robert Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apology," Men and Women
When you dance to your own rhythm,
Life taps its toes to your beat.
~Terri Guillemets
All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774
Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. ~Henry David Thoreau, 1848
When one is pretending the entire body revolts. There come great eruptions and revolts, great dark ravages, and above all, a joylessness. A great, bleak joylessness. Everything that is natural brings joy. ~Anaïs Nin
I breathe freedom. I drink it in long, deep draughts...
It is the answer to the drought of me, to the parched years, to the earth of me that was bare and sear.
It is the rain to the desert of me...
~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "Songs of Life-Freedom: I," A Soul's Faring, 1921
It is not only possible to be the person you pretend to be, but there is less effort involved. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Minister in a Maze," The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, 1850
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. ~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist"
My life's lilies shall unfold on their long stems, and its violets grasp their purple souls out of the soil. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "A Soul's Faring: LXXIV," A Soul's Faring, 1921
No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos. So we still find ourselves in the tangle of existence and being, a tangle which man has never been able to get out of, except by sacrificing the one to the other. ~D.H. Lawrence, "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine," 1925
Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are. ~Julius Charles Hare
To tear away the verbiage and speak the one word that is truly myself! ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), My Little Book of Life, 1912
There is in man an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground round it into a swamp. ~Mark Rutherford (William Hale White)
Many people would be much better if they would let themselves be as good as they really are. They seem to take delight in making themselves less. ~Mark Rutherford (William Hale White)
Don't try so hard to impress. People fall in love with vulnerabilities more than strengths. ~Terri Guillemets
Why try to be someone you're not? Life is hard enough without adding impersonation to the skills required. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
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