- E.E. Cummings, 1955
"God has given you one face, and you make yourself another."
- William Shakespeare
"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
"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
- E.E. Cummings
"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 MacLane
"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
"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth."
- Benjamin Disraeli
"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
"The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"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
"We are betrayed by what is false within."
- George Meredith
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
- Oscar Wilde
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
- Dr. Seuss
"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."
- D.H. Lawrence
"Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do."
- Eric Hoffer
"It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is."
- Desiderius Erasmus
"Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are."
- Julius Charles Hare
"We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin."
- André Berthiaume, Contretemps
"He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself and grows old even in youth among old things."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
"There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself."
- Samuel Johnson
"You must have control of the authorship of your own destiny. The pen that writes your life story must be held in your own hand."
- Irene C. Kassorla
"Is life not a hundred times too short for us to stifle ourselves."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"You were born an original. Don't die a copy."
- John Mason
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not."
- Andre Gide
"There is in a 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), More Pages from a Journal, 1910
"Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it."
- Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners, 1954
"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
