Quotes About Authenticity

There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul.

Truth is one, and he who does the truth in the small thing is of the truth; he who will do it only in a great thing, who postpones the small thing near him to the great farther from him, is not of the truth.

The more originating, living, visible truth, embracing all truths in all relations, is Jesus Christ. He is true: He is the live Truth.

A pretend friendship was the vilest of despicable things.

Most powerful of all powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more powerful than even _to do_. Action _may_ be hypocrisy, but being is the thing itself, and is the parent of action.

There is no law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word.

I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being _desillusionnes_, for they have never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real.

he was always too much of a man to want to look like a man by imitating men. That is unmanly. A boy who wants to look like a man is not a manly boy, and men do not care for his company. A true boy is always welcome to a true man, but a would-be man is better on the other side of the wall.

He is right with himself because right with him whence he came.

but it is not that I do not think you a Christian; it is that I want you to be a downright real Christian, not one that is but trying to feel as a Christian ought to feel. I have lost so much precious time in that way!

In a word, why were they not men at worst, when at best they ought to be more of men than other men?--And here lay the difficulty: by no effort could I get the face before me to fit into the clerical mould which I had all ready in my own mind for it.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved

it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink.

En tiempos de engaño universal, decir la verdad se convierte en un acto revolucionario".

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.