Henry Rollins Quotes

Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.

You've always made the mistake of being yourself.

Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.

I do not wish to hide my origins, nor do I seek to make it a subject of conversation. I am what I am.

I don't want to be no more than what I am.

I'd feel bad pretending my life was anything other than pretty good, so I do the role as well as I can and then I go home, have a cup of tea, see my family and friends, and appreciate what I've got.

If I'm the biggest artist in the world, cool, but I want to just be me.

I am what I am. I can't change that.

I'm not trying to be anything other than the way I was born and raised.

I'll always just be stupid boy, and I'm happy with that.

The only true happiness lies in knowing who you are ... and making peace with it.

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

I'm not trying to be something that I'm not. I'm just trying to be myself and talk about what I know, and admit what I don't know.

Some people work hard to be something that they're not, and I don't work at all, I'm just me. And that can bother anybody I'm not working nearly as hard as the other guys, and they don't like it.

Don't imitate. If you want to know who you are, please avoid imitation, that's a way of avoiding knowing yourself.

I don't have any desire to rebel and be something totally different from what I am.

After they see me, when their mothers are feeding them all that cashmere sweater and girdle ----- [expletive deleted by the New York Times], maybe they'll have a second thought - that they can be themselves and win.

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.

I am who I am; no more, no less.

I am what I am. There's nothing I can do about it.

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

Live like yourself, was soon my lady's word, And lo! two puddings smok'd upon the board.

When I was a kid, I thought I would be an action-movie hero. I was like, "They're gonna be able to CGI my legs by that point." And then I realized that it was probably better if I stayed a little closer to who I actually am rather than trying to be Bruce Willis.

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?