Quotes on being yourself
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
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Judy Garland Quotes
One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.
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Julius Charles Hare Quotes
All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
We are betrayed by what is false within.
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George Meredith Quotes
Learn to be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
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Henri Amiel Quotes
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.
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George Gissing Quotes
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.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.
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James Matthew Barrie Quotes
The white light streams down to be broken up by those human prisms into all the colors of the rainbow.
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Charles R. Brown Quotes
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.
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Samuel Johnson Quotes
God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.
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William Shakespeare Quotes
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.
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Ralph Ellison Quotes
He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.
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Raymond Hull Quotes
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?
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Fanny Brice Quotes
The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
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Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes
You were born an original. Don't die a copy.
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John Mason Quotes
Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.
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Louis Kronenberger Quotes
No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.
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John Morley Quotes
Man would be "otherwise." That's the essence of the specifically human.
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Antonio Machado Quotes
If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
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.
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Boris Pasternak Quotes
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
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Dr. Seuss Quotes
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.
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Shirley MacLaine Quotes
Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
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Michel de Montaigne Quotes
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
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Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
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Confucius Quotes
There is just one life for each of us: our own.
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Euripides Quotes
Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.
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Eric Hoffer Quotes
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
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David Carradine Quotes
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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Honore de Balzac Quotes
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.
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D.H. Lawrence Quotes
Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
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Benjamin Disraeli Quotes
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.
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Samuel Johnson Quotes