Sydney Smith Quotes

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

The will to be oneself is heroism

You and you alone are the only person that can live the life that writes the story that you were meant to tell. And the world needs your story because the world needs your voice.

Life is not a popularity contest. Take the hill, but first answer the question: What is my hill?.

A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.

You don't have to be the sexiest girl or the most talented person to have the X factor. X factor is something you are born with that is your own. And the moment that you realize how to tap into that quality that you have within, and how to bring that individuality out of yourself, that is when you discover the X factor.

That's a song about reaching deep inside yourself where you can completely be who you are.

I don't think the goal is, 'How big a star did you ever become?' I think the goal is, 'Were you able to express yourself?'

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.

I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I've become. If I had, I'd have done it a lot earlier.

If there's one theme in all my work, it's about authenticity and self-expression. It's the idea that some things are, in some real sense, really you - or express what you and others aren't.

Success in any endeavor depends on the degree to which it is an expression of your true self.

There's too much judgment out there. Really what we need to be doing is just all of us finding our own paths towards living the best lives we can live as clearly and boldly in accordance with our own personal values. And that's what I'm trying to do.

You've got one life: find your voice within it.

When I go out and talk to people about how unique they are as a human being and that there's a niche for them that they need to follow through on for their lives, it's what I truly believe in.

Ultimately, it's down to the individual. Some people are born to perform. Some people need to work hard to control themselves.

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

You've got to be oblivious to other people, the push and pull of other people's opinions, the way other people measure success. It's then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things.

The most important thing we can tell young people is not to be an imitation of somebody else. That their life is special. They are the creator of their life and their way and find something that they enjoy doing that doesn't even feel like work. It feels like a passion. And then just by doing that and bringing that to the world, they become architects of change.

I hope someday you see this is all life wants: for you to be your own kind of beautiful & not the kind that makes you forget who you are.

To succeed in life, succeed at being yourself.

All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find it on your own terms.

Can you every single day tell a true testimony of who you are? That's really what life is about.

If you keep changing for every person who tells you to, then who's going to be left? Why get the success and be somebody else?

Everything has its own place and function. That applies to people, although many don't seem to realize it, stuck as they are in the wrong job, the wrong marriage, or the wrong house. When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don't belong.