Quotes About Authenticity

people who listen and don't give a damn, but sit there in order to tell their friends that they have attended a lecture by a famous name. All second-handers.

An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He

No importa que sólo unos pocos en cada generación comprendan y logren la realidad completa de la adecuada estatura humana y que el resto la traicione. Son esos pocos los que mueven al mundo y le dan su sentido a la vida, y son esos pocos a quienes siempre aspiré a dirigirme. El resto no me interesa; no es a mí o a El manantial a quien traicionarán: es a sus propias almas.   Ayn Rand Nueva

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge.

You know me like a book.What kind of book Peter? A dime novel? A love story? A crime thriller? Or just a plagiarized manuscript? No, let's say: like a serial. A good, long, exciting serial—with the last installment missing.

To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.

Simpler, Peter, simpler, more direct, as honest as you can make of a dishonest thing.

Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or 'universal goal,' who don't know what to live for, who moan that they must 'find themselves.' You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I'd think it would be the most shameful one.

Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you – except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.

It is not my function," said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like.

Quien le miente al mundo es esclavo del mundo a partir de ese momento.

It's your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That's the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives.

Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love.

An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: 'It is, therefore I want'. They say: 'I want it, therefore it is.

One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else's dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.

She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else's dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.

In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies.

It is so easy to invent, by mistake, not remember what was there, what is truly remembered?

When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point.

Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.

You could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn't back it up.

Michelle was someone who started from the heart and not the head, from experience rather than abstractions.

At some basic level people were no longer seeing me, I realized, with all my quirks and shortcomings. Instead, they had taken possession of my likeness and made it a vessel for a million different dreams. I knew a time would come when I would disappoint them, falling short of the image that my campaign and I had helped to construct.