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 Duc de La Rochefoucauld

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, www.robertbrault.com

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.
~Boris Pasternak

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

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
~Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

"Be yourself" is about the worst advice you can give some people.
~Tom Masson

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.
~Shirley MacLaine

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.
~Harvey Fierstein

Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
~Henri Frederic Amiel

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.
~George Gissing

No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.
~John Morley

There is just one life for each of us: our own.
~Euripides

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
~Benjamin Disraeli

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.
~Johann von Goethe

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
~Confucius

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?
~Fanny Brice

Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.
~Shakti Gawain

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

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
~Marianne Moore

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
~Samuel Johnson

If you are ashamed to stand by your colors, you had better seek another flag.
~Author Unknown

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
~Oscar Wilde

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
~Johann von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.
~Anais Nin

It is not only possible to be the person you pretend to be, but there is less effort involved.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com/div>Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.
~Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners, 1954

Why try to be someone you're not? Life is hard enough without adding impersonation to the skills required.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
~Kurt Vonnegut

One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
~Oscar Wilde, L'Envoi to Rose-leaf and Apple-leaf, 1882

The white light streams down to be broken up by those human prisms into all the colors of the rainbow.
~Charles R. Brown

Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him, not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.
~Walter Kaufmann