20 Quotes on Staying True to Yourself

Everyone wants to believe that they’re “true to themselves,” but it’s no easy feat. The concept is hard to define and even harder to follow through on. Once out in the world with others, it’s often difficult for us to retain our sense of individuality.

Some great thinkers have advised that the self must be created or “found,” while others have warned to avoid conformity. Still others advise that we must place our focus on others or be in touch with our spirituality. The quotes below reflect the opinions of various accomplished people- great writers, philosophers, scientists, designers, and even boxers- on how to stay true to yourself.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never follow somebody else’s path; it doesn’t work the same way twice for anyone…the path follows you and rolls up behind you as you walk, forcing the next person to find their own way.

J. Michael Straczynski

All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

James Thurber

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

James A. Froude

The one person who most blocks you from a full, happy, and successful life is you. He is therefore wise, who makes himself an asset. We can be our own worst enemy or best friend. So if you feel empty, as many do, start by getting free from yourself as a first stop to vibrant living.

Norman Vincent Peale

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

Muhammad Ali

When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.

Albert Einstein

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

Harry S. Truman

I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.

Rita Mae Brown

Man can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as from a lack of bread.

Richard Wright

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

Aristotle

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Only to the extent that someone is living out self-transcendence, does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with self actualization, but by forgetting and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Viktor E. Frankl

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

Coco Chanel

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

Mark Twain

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.

Thomas Szasz

 

Photo credit: VaughnSaball via Wikimedia

© 2024 BQOTD. All rights reserved.