Guy Finley Quotes

When you live for others' opinions, you are dead. I don't want to live thinking about how I'll be remembered.

I don't really read that much stuff about myself anyways, because I feel as though you then develop this mind-set of just making sure other people would approve of your decisions.

You can get totally messed up trying to please everyone with what you do, but ultimately, you have to please yourself.

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Be really, really true to yourself. That to me, has been key to me in understanding how I want to live the second half of my life.

I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!

I never had time to dream about being anyone else.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

I don't have to prove my life. I just have to live.

I'm not really concerned with the outer success.

The truth is that you shouldn't match your insides to other people's outsides. Life is an inside job, and we just have to do our best.

I think, at the end of the day, you have to live a truthful life and be true to yourself. You have one life, and everything has to fall into place around that.

What mattered to me was that I didn't compromise my soul in order to try to achieve a kind of popularity. The only thing you can do is just live your life.

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.

You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care.

A woman who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people’s evaluations. But no one can adapt perfectly to public opinion. And herein lies the source of their destruction.

I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.

A lot of people that I know are bugged with the idea that they have got to have an audience, or they have got to be liked. I think the more that you fall into that trap it makes your own life harder to come to terms with, because an audience appreciation is only going to be periodic at the best of times.

"What would people say about you when you're gone?" That to me was a very important question. I thought about that for a couple of years and said, "What people say about you when you're gone doesn't matter. You're gone." What really matters is, "What do you say about yourself in the here and now? Are you proud of what you're doing?" If you had a short lease and it ended today, or it ends tomorrow, what would you wish you would have done? You better do it.

Part One: I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy. Part Two: Everybody else is free to do whatever they feel like doing, for a living. Part Three: Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live. There's only one person we have to answer to, of course, and that is ourselves.

Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.

When we know and love the best we are content to lack the approval of the many.

I'm hesitant to judge people. My favorite saying is "you do you." But, hopefully, you don't have to seek external validation from others to feel good about yourself.