Gertrude Stein Quotes

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?

We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.

When you look in the mirror what do you see? Do you see the real you, or what you have been conditioned to believe is you?

No matter where you go, you are what you are playa.

That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.

I understand that nobody understands me, but I can't be someone I'm not.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.

In my job, I am portrayed as a misfit, a grandiose high fashion lady or an unearthly creature. At home, it's important I can look in the mirror, strip away the disguise and be comfortable with who stares back.

What 'Survivor' is really about is the inescapability of your being yourself, even when you have told yourself you can be someone different for 30 days.

At least when you're acting you can be someone. In front of the camera you have to be yourself. And who am I?

I'll be me, but I don't like it.

There's a constant struggle between my ears about who I am and what I mean to the world.

There's who you think you are and who you want to be, and then who you actually are.

The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.

I think I spent a lot of my mid-twenties thinking it was a problem of my onstage persona. But, actually, it was my actual personality. I was still working out what kind of person I was.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?

We are born perfect, and we will die perfect. The problem is that we create that character in our story that we pretend to be, or that we want to be, and we cannot hide that from ourselves. We know that we are pretending to be what we are not in the name of perfection.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

We're all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time - when we aren't flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation - this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.