Most people are other people.  Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.  ~Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905PMB

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"

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

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

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.  ~Michel Eyquem de MontaignePMB

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 GissingCUL

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

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

When you dance to your own rhythm,
Life taps its toes to your beat.
~Terri Guillemets

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

What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.  ~Carl Rogers

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, The Scarlet Letter

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

Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.  ~Allen Ginsberg, quoted in On Being a Writer edited by Bill Strickland, from an interview with Michael Schumacherginsbergblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/mystery-of-inner-moonlight.html

Originality is… a by-product of sincerity.  ~Marianne MooreCUL

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

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

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

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 JohnsonCUL

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

Is life not a hundred times too short for us to stifle ourselves.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

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

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are.  ~Jim Morrison

Ride the energy of your own unique spirit.  Gabrielle Roth

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

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

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

It is not only possible to be the person you pretend to be, but there is less effort involved.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.  ~Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, 1942PMB, p140

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person’s point of view.  ~Ralph Waldo EmersonCUL

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.  ~Desiderius Erasmus

The white light streams down to be broken up by those human prisms into all the colors of the rainbow.  Take your own color in the pattern and be just that.  ~Charles R. Brown

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. LawrenceCUL

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

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

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

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