Iyanla Vanzant Quotes

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.

Having grown up so familiar with creating a pleasing facade, I now end up compelled to reveal things inside and say, 'Okay, now you really see me. Do you still love me?' And then it's never enough; it always has to be total self-revelation.

Men do not change; they unmask themselves.

I tried for a short time to be something I wasn't, and had no success with it. It's a practical solution to just be yourself.

Affectation discovers sooner what one is than it makes known what one would fain appear to be.

For the people that I love I only have one face but for some people we can't have one face.

I'm the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world, so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

We like other people to show themselves to us as they really are.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

You can't really control how people are going to feel about you; all you can really do is be yourself. Because if you seduce somebody, and you seduce them by pretending to be a certain way, once they are seduced they are going to find that you are not that way. And then you have to maintain an image that's not real, so you really screw yourself. The best is to be yourself and hope they like you.

We fell in love with different people. Looking back, we might have done it in a different order, but we got invested. We really wanted to do the flashbacks because we wanted to explore who these women were on the outside versus the inside, and get a fuller picture of the masks we wear.

I think that when you're in love, you progressively go back to who you are.

Dating is about finding out who you are and who others are. If you show up in a masquerade outfit, neither is going to happen.

I think Carl Jung said, you know, I'm gonna paraphrase it badly, but, so much of what we fall in love with in other people is a potential in us that's ready to be realized. We're projecting onto them this amazing thing, but really it's us, and we're very close to integrating it and claiming it. If we do claim it, then we can just love somebody for who they are with all their flaws, but if we don't take that projection back, then we keep wanting them to have that. Then you just realize we're all screwed, that's how it works.

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.

You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not.

You cannot borrow half of who you are from someone else, yet people try to do it all of the time, they just call it a relationship!

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

You can find love when you are famous if you are the same person you were before you were famous.

I had everything I'd hoped for, but I wasn't being myself. So I decided to be honest about who I was. It was strange: The people who loved me for being funny suddenly didn't like me for being... me.

I am fascinated by that notion of people are never as they seem. And that doesn't make them good or bad. It's just we don't ever really show ourselves if we don't have to.

One of the things I love about acting is that it reveals a certain something about yourself, but it doesn't reveal your own personal story.

I hear a lot of girls say, 'I can be myself around you,' and I'm always thinking, 'Who are you when you're with somebody else?'

It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.