Edward Gorey Quotes

We are so ruled by what people tell us we must be that we have forgotten who we are.

Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.

So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's.

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

It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.

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.

If you spend your life walking through somebody else's museum, you never find out whether you're Rembrandt or not.

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

One cannot evolve from one's robothood until one realizes how totally one has been robotized.

For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

When you don't know your values or who you are or you start to believe things other people are telling you, you get lost. I was just lost because I didn't know what I meant to music or what music meant to me. Now I just belong solo and I belong by myself.

You've got to be really dialed into exactly who you are to the one hundredth power or you're just everyone else.

Who has no own conviction dissipates himself in the imitation of others.

First you have to know who you are. That is the most important thing, as if you don't know who you are you will either get swallowed up or you follow some unsuitable trends and just become a nonentity.

It wasn't about how she looked, which was pretty, even though she was always wearing the wrong clothes and those beat-up sneakers. It wasn't about what she said in class--usually something no one else would've thought of, and if they had, something they wouldn't have dared to say. It wasn't that she was different from all the other girls at Jackson. That was obvious. It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn't.

The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel blest by everything.

You have to have a strong sense of your values and a strong sense of who you are, because there are a lot of events and a lot of people who will pull you in this direction or that direction.

Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?

I find myself both as man and as myself something more determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see.

The real religion is not imitation of anybody else, it is a search to find out your own authentic self, who you are.

Before you can be anything, you have to be yourself. That's the hardest thing to find.

Our minds are all different and I believe cultivating a keen introspective sensitivity is absolutely essential in discovering our potential.