Quotes About Authenticity

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling. p.903

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

I know it's a crock of shit. I ain't offering you happily-ever-after. I'm offering you... happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after. Sort of. You know, with warts and shit." -Thayer

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,No more modest than immodest.Unscrew the locks from the doors!Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am, Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me, I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. Writing and talk do not prove me, I carry the plenum of proof in my face, With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.

Reexamine all that you have been told in school, or in church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your soul.

When people observe that your life is in harmony with the message, they may not believe, but they know in their conscience that they have met truth.

Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

Greatest risk of all: to be vulnerable, to allow others to see us as we really are

The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be…. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.

But this is real prayer, down and dirty. It is not nice church prayer that refuses to ask anything because we mostly do not believe that prayers are heard or answered.

The key insight is that honest talk transforms and emancipates when it is received in faithful seriousness.

And that's the way it is.

As long as I live I shall always be My Self - and no other, Just me.

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.

My life is not packaged, Not tidy. There are leftover strands and jagged Edges that cut even my friends.

We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.