John Eldredge Quotes

You have to learn to follow your heart. You can’t let other people pressure you into being something that you’re not. If you want God’s favor in your life, you must be the person He made you to be, not the person your boss wants you to be, not even the person your parents or your husband wants you to be. You can’t let outside expectations keep you from following your own heart.

The worst thing that happens to people when they dress up and go to a party is that they leave their real selves at home.

I strive to live with passion and not to be desensitised to life. Things matter to me. You’ve got to live like that. Otherwise what’s the point? It’s not possible to please everyone and there is no point in trying to be what other people think you should be. For me, it’s important to be who I am, not just to be different but to be as authentic as I can be.

It's so easy to get caught up in what people expect of you. Sometimes, you can just lose yourself.

Be yourself, find out what you love, find out what you really want to do, and go do it. And don't depend on people who don't have your best interests at heart.

I feel like I never get to play any version of myself or get to be a normal person.

Follow your passions, follow your heart, and the things you need will come.

One of the goals of life is to try and be in touch with one's most personal themes-the values, the ideas, styles, colors that are the touchstones of one's own individual life, its real texture and substance.

The secret is to have a sense of yourself, your real self, your unique self. And not just once in a while, or once a day, but all through the day, the week and life.

I would just like to be real and be me. It's just really hard to do walking around and everyone knows who I am.

Some people will never be able to get their real self, but that's fine, because their fake self is also part of them.

You have ideas planted in your head, thoughts you never had before, that tell you how you have to act, how you have to dress and who you have to be. I have been trying to push back, to be authentic, to follow my heart, but it can be hard.

Early in my career I was divided because I had the real self underneath: the lawbreaker, the anarchist, the person who swims against the tide, the outsider, the loner, all of that guy. He was my private self, and I had this other side that wanted to be liked in order to do all those things I dreamed of as a little boy. I didn't realize that those things didn't go together until later. And I'm quite sure that my use of acid and peyote helped me accept what was really going on inside of me instead of what I had imposed on myself.

The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

Ester asked why people are sad. "That’s simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.

I will not be alone if I am my true self. Only by trading my true self for the companionship of another have I ever made myself alone. Because when I gave up my real self, I wound up resenting my "significant other" for "making me" do that-and it was this resentment that ate away at our relationship.

The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.

[E]ach of our voices has something unique to say. Not only should I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity; I can't even find the model by which to live outside myself. I can only find it within.

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself.

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.

I think beauty comes from actually knowing who you are. That's real beauty to me.

You're a unique person. You should do what you're suited to do. We all should. It's the only way to be happy. That pressure is all outside. It's external.

I feel like if I were to play the game completely and just get myself in a giant bottle of nail polish and put myself on display, I would feel like I had somehow cosmically lost. I feel like I'm taking a bunch of the ingredients and using some of them but not all of them and shuffling around and making people think I'm doing my job.