497 – “There are many ways to silence young people and make them invisible. Many ways to anesthetize them, to make them keep quiet, ask nothing, question nothing. There are many ways to sedate them, to keep them from getting involved, to make their dreams flat and dreary, petty and plaintive. … Dear young people, you have it in you to shout.”

–Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome

472 – “Be you. Make sure you’re saying something when you’re saying something. It’s important to sound like you, feel like you, be like you. Be you.”

–Erykah Badu [Attributed]

430 – “Be careful who you open up to. Only a few people actually care, the rest are just curious.”

–anonymous

373 – “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

–Thomas Merton

363 – “Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform.”

–Uppaluri G Krishnamurti

345 – “Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.”

–Amy Lowell

321 – “There are some people who could hear you speak a thousand words and still not understand you. And there are others who will understand without you even speaking a word.”

–anonymous

317 – “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

–Nagasawa in Haruki Murakami novel Norwegian Wood

307 – “We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”

–Alan Watts [See Source Note for context]

285 – “I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”

–Sylvia Plath