A. C. Benson Quotes

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

As soon as you can say what you think and not what some other person has thought for you, you are on the way to being a remarkable man.

Be yourself and think for yourself, and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the inclusions forced upon you by those who have a personal interest in keeping you in ignorance.

You need to be your own individual.

People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.

All I can tell you is that you cannot make choices in your own career, either career choices or choices when you're actually working as an actor, based on trying to downplay or live up to a comparison with somebody else. You just can't do that. You have to do your own work based on your own gut, your own instincts, and your own life.

I would say trust your own judgment and develop your own style that is true in your heart and don't be deterred from that. Just develop that something that's unique to you that you feel you can give. Be true to yourself, trust your own judgment; that's all.

Being cool is being your own self, not doing something that someone else is telling you to do.

My life choices are not supposed to be the gateway to somebody else's. That's my journey.

Be yourself, take control of your life.

I do what I feel I know how to do and don't do things that I don't. I'm a product of my sensibility.

I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. I'm going to figure out what that is.

There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

My parents have always taught me to be myself and to follow my instincts.

The most significant thing is to always stay true to yourself. What brought you to where you are will continue to separate you. The thing is to be different.

You start comparing yourself to other people, you end up trying to be that person. You've got to be your own person, do it your own way. You can be motivated by somebody, but you don't have to take after them.

From the moment we are born, people tell us that the world is like this and like that, this way, that way. It is natural that - for a certain period of time - we end up believing what we are told. But we must soon push these ideas aside and discover our own way of living reality.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time.

All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, "Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don't be a part of the crowd; don't be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own. Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears." But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

Life choices and projects and photo shoots, I can't base them on anybody else but myself. I've done things where I'm like, "Do I want my dad to see this? I don't know!" But the best lesson I can teach my sisters, or any younger women, is "Do what YOU do. Don't follow me, follow you."

Never follow anybody else's idea - that is very dangerous because you will become imitative. Always follow your own nature, self-nature; only then will you attain to freedom. It is better to die following one's nature than to live following somebody's else's nature, because that will be a pseudo life. To die following one's nature is beautiful, because that death too will be authentic.

I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people.