Quotes About Self-expression

People ought to be allowed to drop to pieces in any way they choose. I even disapprove of propping them up. Let nations, like men, die in peace. I rather feel as if I had been delivering pep talks to men dying of cancer.

When I came overseas, I realized that there are many ideologies and many trends, and it's also very hard to produce honest art and honest literature. I decided that I didn't want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because that's also a kind of pressure that doesn't allow absolute freedom. So I decided that I was only going to produce works that were satisfactory to me, and that meant not following any trends and being anti-ideological.

When you lost your voice, you lost the ability to make sense of yourself.

Now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar for a structure called "individuality.

In the future, I'll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.

He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you?

Faint-hearted as usual, she had left it too late. In the future, I'll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.

Love is experienced differently by each of us, but for most of us five aspects of love stand out. We feel loved when we receive attention, acceptance, appreciation, and affection, and when we are allowed the freedom to live in accord with our own deepest needs and wishes.

A lack of love means not receiving the five A's of adult love: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing us to be ourselves.

Safety refers to an inner sense that no harm will come to us for freely being ourselves in feeling, word and deed. Security refers to an inner sense that someone will be there for us.

Whitman would be appalled in the 1850s when holiday celebrations began to be mass-oriented spectacles manipulated by professionals. One of his most famous poetic lines—" I celebrate myself"—can be taken, on one level, as an attempt to restore the idea of celebration, which was fast becoming coldly manipulative, to the personal and genuinely celebratory.

I've been keeping a diary for thirty-three years and write in it every morning. Most of it's just whining, but every so often there'll be something I can use later: a joke, a description, a quote. It's an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. 'That's not what you said on February 3 1996 ' I'll say to someone.

Resist trying to be what other people want you to be. Anyone in your life who tries to change you is really saying: as I can't control myself I will try and control you. By the same token, don't attempt to control other people's behaviour - it's not your place.

Your response is your own. It is created by no one else but you.

I think all those rules are boring. About what people can and can't wear. Surely everyone should be able to wear whatever they like?

Rules don't apply here," laughed Lisa. "Dennis, you can be whoever you want to be!" 9

Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.

We banish the misaligned when we align with what we are called to; we become visible and real when we give our gift and stop waiting for the gift to be given to us.

Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis's penis would be larger than your penis.

Funny how women are ashamed of their inner fairy whereas men are forever proudly displaying their inner cowboy or fireman

I finally learned that it was all right to say something wasn't working for me when it wasn't working. The world doesn't come crashing down when you speak the truth.

So if your life truths have to be protected the same way some people keep their couches in plastic, then ciao. Have a nice life. If we bump into each other at Target, I'm the one buying the sour gummy worms, and that's all you need to know about me.

Your only job—and it's a big one—is to try to speak and live your own honest truth. That truth might shift. You might need more time to even understand what that truth is. That's it. That's the job. Trying to manage or control everyone else? Not the job. Impossible, besides.

Seriously, what would you prefer? To stand out from everyone else, or disappear in the crowd? Because I call the latter 'sheep.