Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernadette Peters

Peters frames a famously ambivalent Sondheim song as a piece of self-help, and that slight simplification is the tell. "No One Is Alone" (from Into the Woods) isn’t a victory lap for rugged individualism; it’s a quiet argument about agency under pressure, delivered by a character who has learned too late that every choice ricochets. When Peters says it’s "all about thinking for yourself and being your own person", she’s translating Sondheim’s moral complexity into a performer’s, and a survivor’s, ethic: don’t outsource your compass, even when the world insists on easy answers.

The intent here is practical, almost pedagogical. Peters has spent decades embodying Sondheim women who crave permission and then discover the cost of taking it. Her line reads like advice she wishes the characters could have heard earlier: you can’t plead innocence by blaming the script, the parents, the prince, the culture. Yet the subtext pushes back on the lone-wolf fantasy. The song’s title insists on a paradox: you must choose for yourself, but your choices are never sealed off from other people. You’re not alone because you’re supported; you’re not alone because you’re implicated.

Context matters: Sondheim arrived in a late-20th-century America suspicious of grand moral declarations. Into the Woods dismantles fairy-tale certainty, and "No One Is Alone" is the show’s most humane sleight of hand: it comforts without absolving. Peters’ reading captures why it still lands now, in an era of curated identities and algorithmic groupthink. Be your own person, sure. Just don’t pretend that person exists in isolation.