Quotes · Skopia

29 quotes

Hamlet · 1616

★ 9.5

Political literature

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Albert Camus

The Rebel · 1951

★ 7.1

Almanac

What you would seem to be, be really.

Benjamin Franklin

1744

★ 3.9

Film · Road movie · Drama (film) · Drama

Talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things.

George Hanson

Easy Rider · 1969

★ 3.9

Essay

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself.

Michel de Montaigne

Essays · 1580

★ 3.8

Essay

Be so true to thyself as thou be not false to others.

Francis Bacon

1625

★ 3.7

Play

What ought a man to be? Well, my short answer is "himself."

Henrik Ibsen

1867

★ 3.7

Film · Romantic comedy (film) · Comedy drama (film) · Romantic comedy · Comedy drama

Honey, all you have to be by the time you're 23 is yourself.

Troy Dyer

Reality Bites · 1994

★ 3.7

The greatest gift you will ever give is your honest self.

Fred Rogers

2003

★ 3.7

Poem

Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery.

Matthew Arnold

1852

★ 3.6

And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well—but 'tis not true.

Matthew Arnold

The Buried Life · 1852

★ 3.6

Travel writing

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

Robert Louis Stevenson

1882

★ 3.6

Novel

She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

Kate Chopin

The Awakening · 1899

★ 3.6

Essay · Magazine

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Didion

Vogue · 1961

★ 3.6

Philosophical literature

A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

1970

★ 3.6

You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way.

Richard Bach

Jonathan Livingston Seagull · 1970

★ 3.5

Interview

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.

Jim Morrison

1981

★ 3.5

Poem

Are all men in disguise except those crying?

Dannie Abse

1986

★ 3.5

Novel

If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.

Hermann Hesse

Gertrude · 1910

★ 3.5

Essay

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays: First Series (Emerson) · 1841

★ 2.2

Feminist literature

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.

Betty Friedan

The Feminine Mystique · 1963

★ 2.1

Essay · Magazine · Political literature

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

Oscar Wilde

Fortnightly Review · 1891

★ 2.0

Film · Animation (film) · Fantasy (film) · Animation · Fantasy

Look, the point is, stop trying so hard to be something you're not.

Gobber

How to Train Your Dragon · 2010

★ 2.0

Novel · Magazine · Modernist literature

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.

James Joyce

The Egoist · 1915

★ 1.9

Novel · Magazine · Modernist literature

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

James Joyce

The Egoist · 1915

★ 1.9

Interview · Newspaper

Best advice I ever got was an old friend mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.

James Baldwin

1984

★ 1.9

Novel · Coming of age story

I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

Hermann Hesse

Demian · 1919

★ 1.9

Film · Road movie · Comedy (film) · Comedy

You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better. I'm an easy target. Yeah, you're right. I talk too much. I also listen too much. I could be a cold-hearted cynic like you, but I don't like to hurt people's feelings. Well, you think what you want about me. I'm not changing. I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. 'Cause I'm the real article. What you see is what you get.

Del Griffith

Planes, Trains and Automobiles · 1987

★ 1.9

Novel · Coming of age story

No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that-one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can.

Hermann Hesse

Demian · 1919

★ 1.8

Sourced and curated.