“Just be yourself,” you’ve heard, time and time again. But what does that really mean? In order to be yourself, you have to know what a “yourself” is, right? What if you feel like you’ve lost yourself? Or don’t like yourself?

Well, here are some words of wisdom from the masters, who have thought long and hard on this matter:

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.  ~e.e. cummings, 1955

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.  ~Raymond Hull

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.  ~William Shakespeare

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.  I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory.  I was naïve.  I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.  It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with:  that I am nobody but myself.  ~Ralph Ellison, “Battle Royal”

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.  ~James Matthew Barrie

Most people are other people.  Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.  ~Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.  ~Judy Garland

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.  ~David Carradine

A man who is “of sound mind” is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.  ~Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, 1942

I am told to just be myself, but as much as I have practiced the impression, I am still no good at it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity.  Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.  ~Boris Pasternak

Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.  ~Shakti Gawain