Meaning
Remain faithful to your own principles, feelings, and identity rather than deceiving yourself or bending to others' expectations. The logic of the original couplet is that self-honesty is the root of honesty toward everyone else. Solemn and aphoristic, almost always quoted verbatim in its archaic wording, it is a staple of graduations, eulogies, and inspirational writing. Formal, earnest, and aphoristic; quoted verbatim in archaic wording and sometimes preached as if it were scripture. Regional use: General English (Shakespearean origin).
Origin
Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 3, lines 78-80: Polonius closes his send-off advice to Laertes with 'This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man'. The Phrase Finder treats it as Shakespeare's coinage and regularly notes the irony that this sincere maxim is spoken by a verbose, worldly courtier whose own conduct hardly matches it. Detached from that context, the line spread through quotation culture - school readers, sermons, songs, and films such as Dead Poets Society - to become one of the most quoted moral precepts in English, often mistaken for a Bible verse.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be true to yourself
- to your own self be true
- true to thine own self
Usage Examples
- He turned down the transfer to head office - to thine own self be true, he told his sister.
- Her commencement address ended with a plea that the graduates stay, above all, true to their own selves.
- To thine own self be true, my grandmother used to say, and the rest of life sorts itself out.