[F]ind 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 (b.1927) [In context, this advice is targeted to singers, but oh! how well it applies to us all. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]
Everybody has their own story to tell. Your life is like a book that you don’t ever get to put down. So make it interesting. ~Brian & Johnathan, http://www.thegaybeards.com
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, 1955
He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away. ~Raymond Hull
God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. ~William Shakespeare
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”
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another. ~James Matthew Barrie
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. ~Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else. ~Judy Garland
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves. ~François VI de la Rochefoucault
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. ~David Carradine
A man who is “of sound mind” is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key. ~Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, 1942
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,
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. ~e.e. cummings
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. ~Samuel Johnson,The Rambler, 1750
Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another. ~Homer
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