If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John UpdikeRead
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.
Interpretation
Celebrity can distort reality, leading individuals to lose their true selves as they become overly focused on being observed.
This quote highlights the paradox of celebrity, suggesting that the fame associated with being a public figure can consume one's true identity. When one becomes aware of being constantly watched, it may hinder their ability to experience life authentically, resulting in a form of blindness to their genuine self and surroundings as they become overwhelmed by the performance of being a celebrity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the impact of social media on personal identity.
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. _x000D_ _x000D_ Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
Every time I see the bumper sticker that says “We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,” I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car.
I'm not much like myself any more.
The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise
I want nothing less than a faith founded upon a rock, faith in the constitution of things. The various man-made creeds are fictitious, like the constellations Orion, Cassiopeia’s Chair, the Big Dipper; the only thing real in them is the stars, and the only thing real in the creeds is the soul’s aspiration toward the Infinite.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely.
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