Billy Corgan Quotes

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

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.

Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.

Be who you are. Otherwise, you end up committing suicide. You end up marrying people when you shouldn't be marrying them and having terrible, secret lives.

So many people go through life, and they never deal with their own issues, no matter what the issues are - ours happen to be gender identity. But, how many people go through life and just waste an entire life 'cause they'd never deal with themselves to be who they are.

Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?

I am a very honest person, and I can only say there are moments in my life where I really did think I was being me in the sense of my morals and beliefs and the way I acted. But when I look back at certain things that I wore and my hair and make-up, I was like, 'Whoa! That wasn't me!' But I didn't know it back then.

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.

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.

Perhaps we've got so involved in the false selves we project on social media that we've forgotten that our real selves, our private selves, are different, are worth saving.

There is your persona and then there's the real you. I was living inside my persona too much.

One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.

Shake yourself free from the manikin you create out of a false interpretation of what you do and what you feel, and you'll at once see that the manikin you make yourself is nothing at all like what you really are or what you really can be!

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

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

I don't know who I am. But I do know who I'm not. I have occasionally tried playing people I'm definitely not, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience.

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

When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don't know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.

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.

It's not like my old self - I'm not in character anymore, I'm me. I'm not hiding behind that anymore.

Once I looked into a mirror at my face I felt like it was completely convincing. I was Salieri.

Be your true self. Because if you're not, there are consequences to be paid.

There's no reason to change what you are, but if you're not being you, then you need to acknowledge that.

My problem was I let myself become known before I knew myself.