Gene Luen Yang Quotes

Getting to be authentic is so liberating.

The very fact that we wish for liberation shows that freedom from all bondage is our real nature. It is not to be freshly acquired. All that is necessary is to get rid of the false notion that we are bound.

It is when I am working that the real me comes out - that is when I am the most real and honest.

The real rub is finding that authentic self and it's not something that's going to come to you overnight.

To know what that true self is without social pressure is to know your true nature.

What we must try to be, of course, is ourselves and wholeheartedly. We must find out what we really are and what we really want.

I never really did abandon my true self. It's not like I invented this imaginary person and started to be her.

Whoever you pretend to be, you must face yourself eventually.

Often we're recreating what we think we're supposed to be as human beings. What we've been told we're supposed to be, instead of who we authentically are. The key about the creation of full self-expression is to be authentically who you are, to project that.

I'm still trying to find out who Paula Cole is. I always am - and I always will be - my real, inside self, which has no name.

Be that self which one truly is.

Don't try to be me. No one but me can be me. But you can be you. Look inside yourself and get to know who the real you is. And then be that person. The best version of you.

A lot of people go on this journey of finding themselves and then eventually realize that their true self wasn't on the outside but it's always been there.

Before, I had an idea of what I thought I needed to be, and I'm realizing more and more that being yourself is the best thing.

If you re not speaking your own truth, you will never be able to be all you are meant to be. You cannot be pretending to be somebody else.

The wholeness and freedom we seek is our true nature, who we really are.

The final aim is not to know, but to be.... You've got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto.

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two. In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.

Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.

Many people don't realise until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are.

The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

Just be what it is that you are, and that is just fine. You don't have to be what you're not in any way. Live that and live that fully, and that is where you discover ecstasy. You can't really have ecstasy as something other than yourself

Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.

There can be only one purpose for relationships-and for all of life: to be and to decide Who You Really Are.