Marcel Proust Quotes

I've always been fascinated by this idea of who we are versus who we want to be.

I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

Many people dedicate their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like, rather than actualizing themselves. This difference between self-actualization and self-image actualization is very important. Most people live only for their image

Did you ever wonder if the person in the picture is the same one you see when you look in the mirror?" - "That's the eternal question, isn't it? Are we born who we are, or do we make ourselves that way?

I want to know who you are as a person, and then I want you to develop as a whole human being.

My success is not who I am.

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

You're looking at a different me than I'm looking at.

I know who I am by now. And I am my own brand.

If you would make the most of yourself, never picture yourself as anything different from what you would actually be, the man or woman you long to become.

What do I see when I look in the mirror? One handsome man. No, I see the same person I have seen for the last 27 years: the person I believed I could be when I was a child, the person I have inspired and dreamed to be all my life, and that's the person I have seen, from being that big to as big as the roof - the same guy.

There's who you think you are and who you want to be, and then who you actually are.

The struggle to excavate your true, authentic self from beneath the mountain of conditioning and ridiculous expectation is the epic struggle of your lifetime.

I think people make their own faces, as they grow.

I am not the kind of person I want to be.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

We think we need to create ourselves, always doing a paste-up job on our personalities. That is because we're trying to be special rather than real. We're pathetically trying to conform with all the other people trying to do the same.

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

Act like the person you conceive yourself to be.

I spent more time playing a person I was not than the person I am.

Create a vision of who you want to be, and then live into that picture as if it were already true.

We rigidify our self-image to portray a certain identity to the world, which is one of the key impediments to authenticity.

I wonder how I seem to them. They must see someone I don't see. Someone capable and strong. Someone I can't be; someone I can be.

I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.

When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a colouring book, with the inside not yet completed.