Philip K. Dick Quotes

You know, then that the public Somebody you are when you 'have a name' is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath

With a lot of actors, you've got to chip through the surface to see who the real person is.

I think a life of a human being is not something you can explain in a few interview questions. The stuff you do in the media is sometimes a great reflection and sometimes not a great reflection of who you are as a person.

I realized that... at the core of who we are, we're these perfect beings - and we're not taught that.

It is hard to find the soul of Mick Jagger. It is very hidden. I think his true personality has receded so far behind the facade that he can no longer find the real person himself.

We are only what we are in the dark; all the rest is reputation.

It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.

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.

It's much more interesting to embrace who you really are rather than waste energy pretending to be someone else.

We are so defined by how people see us. We're a very materialistic culture. We're a very image-driven culture. What if that goes away and you are left with, God help us, what, indeed, is your essential self?

In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.

It's a lot harder to be clear-headed, but the good stuff is when you start realizing who's really you.

Thou art in the end what thou art. Put on wigs with millions of curls, set thy foot upon ell-high rocks. Thou abidest ever--what thou art.

The first and most important step in the process of becoming genuinely is to be once again authenticated by the original designer.

Every man, however good he may be, has a yet better man dwelling in him, which is properly himself, but to whom nevertheless he is often unfaithful. It is to this interior and less mutable being that we should attach ourselves, not to be changeable, every-day man.

Situations reveal who we are, they don't create who we are.

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.

It was then that I realized that while playing the well-meaning tolerant individual (in short: liberal) garnered you fans and grades, it didn't matter. In my heart and head, I was a fraud.

A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.

Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we're supposed to be and embracing who we are.

Something nonhuman doesn’t become human by getting older and bigger; whatever is human is human from the beginning.

If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.

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

Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be.