Gena Showalter Quotes

When you're growing up, the most important thing is to try to not change yourself too much. Be you, because everyone else is taken.

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.

As nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches!

What does it mean to be yourself?” he asked. “If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you’re doing that already. If it means to act like you’re exempt from society’s influence, that’s the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to ‘be yourself’ is obviously nonsense. But our brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more comfortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe we have no idea how to behave.

Anybody who told you to be yourself simply couldn't have given you worse advice.

My mom has raised me saying, "Always be yourself." So to be able to play a character that verifies just that, is such a thrill and adventure for me.

The greatest fear people have is that of being themselves. They want to be 50 Cent or someone else. They do what everyone else does even if it doesn’t fit where and who they are. But you get nowhere that way; your energy is weak and no one pays attention to you. You’re running away from the one thing that you own – what makes you different. I lost that fear. And once I felt the power that I had by showing the world I didn’t care about being like other people, I could never go back.

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

No matter what happens, always be yourself.

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or other people's models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.

You've always made the mistake of being yourself.

Be your authentic self. Your authentic self is who you are when you have no fear of judgment, or before the world starts pushing you around and telling you who you're supposed to be. Your fictional self is who you are when you have a social mask on to please everyone else. Give yourself permission to be your authentic self.

I find sometimes it's easy to be myself, sometimes I find it's better to be somebody else.

If I had to give one piece of advice to incoming college freshmen, I'd say always be true to yourself.

Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.

We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're unique to start with. But we then go through some sort of boot camp from the age of zero to about 18 where we learn everything we can about how not to be unique.

I was always a class clown, so I never had trouble fitting in; I just had trouble finding out where I really wanted to be.

Now all of a sudden I'm so less interested in pretending to be a lot of other people, and much more interested in being me.

I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing.

Yeah, it's nice to look up to people, but the more you try to be somebody else, the less you are of yourself.

Everyone kept telling me, Just be yourself. Be yourself. I kept thinking, there's got to be more to it than that!

Get to know the real you, rather than try to look like or dress like those around you.

I've spent a lot of time self-reflecting. Especially as an actor, you have to know yourself really well in order to do things effectively. And when I dress, I dress for me. I don't dress to make other people think that I'm this way or that way.

Often we're recreating what we think we're supposed to be as human beings. What we've been told we're supposed to be, instead of who we authentically are. The key about the creation of full self-expression is to be authentically who you are, to project that.

I'm not different for the sake of being different, only for the desperate sake of being myself. I can't join your gang: you'd think I was a phony and I'd know it.