evidence: This page contains quotations either misquoted or erroneously attributed to Henry D. Thoreau [...] The second half of this quotation is misattributed to Thoreau and may be a misquotation or misremembering of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ (1809-1894) "The Voiceless": [...] Be yourself, not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be. – This quotation is spoken by the character of Thoreau in the 1970 play, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, by Robert Edwin Lee and Jerome Lawrence, but does not appear in any of Thoreau’s writings.