John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

We all have a social mask, right? We put it on, we go out, put our best foot forward, our best image. But behind that social mask is a personal truth, what we really, really believe about who we are and what we're capable of.

There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.

Anyone becomes mannered if you think too much about what other people think.

We probably wouldn't worry about what people think of us if we could know how seldom they do.

I try to live my life as honestly as I can, and the last thing I want is to pretend to be something I'm not. To pretend to myself I am a sex symbol would somehow be dishonest. I'd feel, in my heart, that I were behaving artificially and that's the last thing I want to do.

You should never step outside of your life and look at it like it's this malleable thing you can shape so that people view it a certain way.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.

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

I've given up trying to understand what people think about me.

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?

In some way they are all self-portraits, but I think I know what you mean by asking this - I would say, it is too idealistic to paint yourself.

You cannot really be too concerned with what people think of you. You're on your own adventure of growth and discovery. So it's not always good to be who people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well ... which is easily done, because then you don't have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else.

And even though people like to furrow their brow like they suspect you're not being honest about yourself, the truth is that they worry that you're not serving their idea of you.

I don't have all that great an awareness of how people see me in life. I don't find myself thinking about it a lot.

He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.

The best lies about me are the ones I told.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.

Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

Man is bound to lie about himself

I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.

Telling others about oneself is...no simple matter. It depends on what we think they think we ought to be like

The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people's minds.