Philosophers

Perhaps the two greatest words of wisdom I ever heard were uttered by philosophers.

Socrates said, "Know yourself." Know who you really are. Do not allow denial and self-deception to blind you from the truth about yourself.

Michel de Montaigne took it a little further. He wrote, "Be yourself." It is amazing how many people choose to live someone else's life rather than their own.

To be yourself, and nobody but yourself, in a world that is doing its best, day and night, to conform you to anything and everything but yourself, means to fight a hard battle - and to never stop fighting.

If you cannot be loyal to yourself, what can you be loyal to?

As Shakespeare put it, "This above all: to thine own self be true."