Being Yourself Quotes

• 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.
• He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.
• God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.
• 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. 
• The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.
• Most people are other people.  Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
• Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
• We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves. 
• If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. 
• A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key. 
• I am told to just be myself, but as much as I have practiced the impression, I am still no good at it. 
• The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity.  Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.
• It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
• Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.
• Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another. 
• How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
• "Be yourself" is about the worst advice you can give some people. 
• I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I've written for myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.
• Never be bullied into silence.  Never allow yourself to be made a victim.  Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.
• Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not. 
• I am much better employed from every point of view, when I live solely for my own satisfaction, than when I begin to worry about the world.  The world frightens me, and a frightened man is no good for anything.
• No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character. 
• There is just one life for each of us:  our
• Never apologize for showing feeling.  When you do so, you apologize for the truth. 
• If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.
• Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
• Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you? 
• Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness. 
• 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.
• The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. 
• Originality is... a by-product of sincerity. 
• Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
• If you are ashamed to stand by your colors, you had better seek another flag.
• To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
• All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own. 
• When one is pretending the entire body revolts.
• It is not only possible to be the person you pretend to be, but there is less effort involved.
• We are betrayed by what is false within. 
• 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.