Quotes About Authenticity

Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

You are constantly invited to be what you are.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.

Imitation is suicide.

Your actions speak so loudly, I can not hear what you are saying.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.

Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.

I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Life is to be lived, not controlled.

I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.

Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are.