If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
David Carradine

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
Confucius

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

We are betrayed by what is false within.
George Meredith

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

You were born an original. Don’t die a copy.
John Mason

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

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

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
E.E. cummings

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.
William Shakespeare

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

Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.
Francois-1665*

Man would be otherwise. That’s the essence of the specifically human.
Antonio Machado

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

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

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

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

True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.
David Tyson Gentry

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.
Andre Gide

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

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

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

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.
Raymond Hull

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde-1905*

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
Judy Garland

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

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
Homer

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

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

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

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

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

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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.
Andre Berthiaume