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

• A human being is a part of the whole called the "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of...consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection of a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in all its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. ~ Albert Einstein
  
  

• 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
  
  

• A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be. ~ Abraham Maslow, psychologist
  
  
• You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself. ~Alan Alda
  
  
• Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
  
  
• Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. ~Dr. Alexis Carrel
  
  
• It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere. ~Agnes Repplier
  
  
• 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 Montaigne
  
  
• Man would be "otherwise." That's the essence of the specifically human. ~Antonio Machado
  
  
• 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
  
  
• The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge. ~Eckhart
  
  
• 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