A few thoughts for today ( click photo for larger image ):
– 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
– 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 Emerson
– 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
– Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. ~Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905
– We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
– Learn to… be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not. ~Henri Frederic Amiel
– 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
People often think they’ve been themselves until a point in life where it becomes apparent to them they haven’t. You then see major career, status, location and lifestyle changes.
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