Jean-Georges Vongerichten Quotes

When I was a child, I always wanted to be funny and to please people in my family. As you grow up that instinct becomes more refined, but it's still there.

I have learned, as I get older, just to be who I am.

When I started doing my act, I wasn't married and didn't have kids. I was probably 29 years old. Some people say that's not a kid, but when you're 50, and you look back to when you were 30, you were a kid. You look back on your 30s and think, "I was an idiot!" But I would just do things then I thought were funny. I couldn't have cared less who thought anything about it.

Now, as I move through my fifties, I can be professional and domestic, creative and intellectual, patient and urgent. I have learned that we should never settle for someone else's definition of who we can be. Growing to this age, I realize, is kind of like feeling your voice deepen. It's still your voice, but it has more substance, and it sounds like it knows its own origins.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

I want to be simple. I think that we try - and we think when we grow up - that we have the truth, because we experience and stuff. But that bullsh*t actually.

As I've matured, I've developed more confidence in pattern mixing and in having a slimmer fit and in taking some risks, and I enjoy it!

A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts.

I don't want to feel that I'm a singer or an actress - being able to say that those are just experiences is what I enjoy.

I notice that as I get rid of the protective covering of the middle years, I am more openly amused and incautious and less careful socially, and that all this makes for increasingly pleasant contacts with the world.

But for me, to get the tattoo was part of moving into adulthood. Making a choice that is permanent and that I'll have to stick with.

What makes me happy about the show, and what I hope people take away from it is: "Just be yourself." I know that's supremely corny, but I really think that just being honest with yourself and being honest with everyone around you is the best way to live.

Relax. Be yourself. Play a lot.

Self-actualizing people are those who have come to a high level of maturation, health and self-fulfillment... the values that self-actualizers appreciate include truth, creativity, beauty, goodness, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, justice, simplicity, and self-sufficiency.

Be the person you are. Never try to be another, and you will become mature. Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost.

And I'd like to leave quite a few friends behind and I hope I will. Other than that, I don't want nobody putting me on a pedestal when I leave here. I'm just one of the people ... just me.

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

The beauty of personal authenticity can compensate for the lost beauty of our youth.

I used to need the character but as I've gotten older I need it less and less - I prefer to play some version of myself. To approach any acting job as me just being me.

Don't let the fear of not pleasing someone stop you from being creative.

I don't try to do anything. I think the moment that I'm like, "Oh, I have to be this way or that way" is the moment that I become sad, or maybe an asshole. So I just try to be myself and put out what is most natural. But I think I am - I mean, I've seen a lot, been through a lot. But something remains sort of naïve within me. And I just try to nurture that.

I used to edit myself. If something seemed super-simple I had to make it more complicated. Now I'm trying to let what's in there come out and acknowledge where I come from. I'm trying to make it more. ..true.

To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above.

I just try to do me, and I feel like it works.

Walking humbly, you are more of a man than you were when you walked proudly.