To Be Yourself Quotes

“A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

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, E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised

“Everybody is condemned from his early childhood. Whatever he does on his own is not acceptable, because the crowd of people in which a child is born have their own ideas and ideals. The child has to fit with their ideas
and ideals. The people who are in power are able to mold the child in the way they want.
This is the psychology behind the fact that everybody wants to pretend to be what he is not.  They have never been allowed to be themselves. Each person has been made into somebody else. Everybody knows that they
have been forced and molded into something that they are not. Nobody is themselves and nobody is at ease with themselves.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten, The Call of the Heart 

“In this world, there is only one happiness and that is to be yourself. And because nobody is himself, everybody is trying somehow to hide, with masks, with pretensions and with hypocrisy.  They are being taught everything in the education system, but they are not taught to be themselves.  This is what makes everybody miserable. To be what you do not want to be, to do something that you do not want to do. These things are the basis of all
misery. Sooner or later, you have to decide. You have to say: Whatever the cost, I want to be myself. Condemned, ridiculed, losing respectability, everything is ok, but I cannot pretend anymore to be somebody else.
This decision and declaration of freedom, freedom from the weight of the crowd of people, gives back your natural being. Then you can simply be yourself just as you are.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten, The Call of the Heart 

“Society creates all kinds of conditioning and hindrances for us to reach our true nature. Society does not allow us to be ourselves.
Society is dampening all our attempts to be happy. The whole effort and conditioning of culture, politics, religion, education, media and civilization is not to allow you to be your own natural self, not to allow you to be happy.
This is done for the simple reason that the person who can be himself and who can be happy cannot be manipulated. if people are to be manipulated - politically, socially and religiously - then their trust to be themselves has to be destroyed. We have not yet been able to create a natural and life-affirmative culture. So the individual has to make every
effort to be himself and to be happy for himself, so that others also can be allowed to be who they are and to be happy.
The first concern is our own being, our own consciousness, our true self, and everything else is secondary. The first concern is not society, the church, the world and to fight for your country. The first responsibility is to discover our innermost being, our true self. Once it is discovered everything else becomes easy, and it happens on its own accord. Then love, silence, joy, truth, compasion, freedom, creativity and grace flows. They are by-products of consciousness.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten, The Way of the Heart