Jason Mraz Quotes

The best advice that I've gotten from Nas is honestly to just be me and to keep staying true to myself. It took me a long time to figure out how to pop, but then, when you get famous, people are kind of like, 'Oh, well, we don't want as much of you.'

To force something that was not organic to who I am was tough on me, and so I can relate to all those girls and guys out there going through the same thing.

I've spent twenty-eight years doing what everyone around me expected me to do...being what everyone around me has expected me to be. And it's horrid to be someone else's vision of yourself.

I had been in a place where I was letting too many people dictate who I should be and what I should be, and I was trying to make everybody happy to the point where it was just killing me. I'd completely lost myself. It's kind of funny now that people think I've completely changed myself for Marilyn Manson, when this is actually the first time in my life that I took a stand and said, "This is who I am and this is who I've always wanted to be, and I'm finally with somebody who lets me be who I want to be."

Ironically, it was because I was raised as a Muslim in the South, that I realised the value in being true to who you really are. I've just got so many things going on inside. I don't know how to resolve all of them other than being true to who I am.

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.

What's great is that starting a blog can get you lot of attention for your writing. But it doesn't have to be for anybody other than yourself.

That's definitely something I've experienced my whole life - people thinking one thing and then discovering that I'm not, hopefully. So I relate to having to fight that and claim my own identity, when people are trying to throw different ones at me.

The challenge is how strange and different my voice sounds, so I have tried to sound like other people and tried to be something I wasn't. I have tried to be a soul singer because someone else thought that a good idea. Not because I did.

I always tried so hard to fit in, and then I figured out that I didn't want to fit.

I'm a huge freak, and always have been. I spent the first part of my life trying really desperately not to be one, and it was just a waste of time.

We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.

I think everyone is trying to figure out who they are and their own thing.

I don't know what else I would be if I wasn't me. I am not looking from the outside, looking back. I am who I am.

My biggest challenge was to make sure that the songs I did were who I am.

Be yourself. I had this three-week period where I wore this straw fedora. I thought it was what chicks wanted. And then it dawned on me that I was trying to be something that I wasn't, so I took the fedora off. So be yourself.

You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.

I think there's a lot of pressure on young people to really be the thing that everyone is telling them that they are, opposed to discovering it for themselves.

When you have a lot of people telling you what you are and perceiving you in a certain way, it's difficult to find your own identity.

Success in any endeavor depends on the degree to which it is an expression of your true self.

I started off doing theater as a kid, and I always played a character. I hid behind the script and was told where to go. But to actually perform as yourself is very difficult. I didn't used to enjoy it, but now I do.

All my work is not personal - I've been trying to get away from that into the true self underneath all the tastes and things we think make up a self.

When I go out and talk to people about how unique they are as a human being and that there's a niche for them that they need to follow through on for their lives, it's what I truly believe in.

I cannot be anyone else but Memphis. I tried that, and I was not happy with myself.

I think, a lot of my career and my life before I went to Sweden, I felt like I was trying to be someone else.