Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Avoid all affectation and singularity. What is according to nature is best, and what is contrary to it is always distasteful. Nothing is graceful that is not our own.

I have no affectation when I speak.

I like to be real. I don't like things to be staged or fussy.

If you pretend to be somebody that you're not when you write songs - and I did that on some of the early Styx albums - nobody cares about what you have to say.

Live a sincere life; be natural, and be honest with yourself.

What we want is to be real. Let us not appear to be more than we are. Don't let us put on any cant, any assumed humility, but let us be real; that is the delight of God. God wants us to be real men and women, and if we profess to be what we are not, God knows all about us. God hates sham.

Being honest is what counts. To make the ordinary extraordinary is so much better than starting with the extraordinary.

With trees and rocks and the sea and the stars and the clouds and the sun - you cannot be unreal, you cannot be phoney. You HAVE to be real because when you are encountering nature, nature creates something in you which is natural. Responding to nature continuously, you become natural.

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray... I am myself the matter of my book.

To express yourself as you are, without any intentional, fancy way of adjusting yourself, is the most important thing.

I don't believe in dressing up reality. I don't believe in using makeup to make things look smoother.

High rank and soft manners may not always belong to a true heart.

In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.

I'm not one of those people who has an act.

You don't need to over-dramatise life, you can just reflect it. It's more interesting, in a way, if it appears to ring true.

I want that every piece of art be honest, never mind what it is about.

I love when a scene can almost be boring because it's so honest, you know.

A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the facade of his appearance.

If people could be as honest as animals, what a different world it would be.

There's nothing I despise more than people trying to be something that they're not.

Why should we change onstage? We're not trying to be something big and fancy, it's just us, doing what we do, we'd like to keep it that way.

I feel strongly that I need to try to make my shows as real as possible. What you see is what you get.

Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.