Quotes About Authenticity

I challenge you to be finished with rationalizations and hypocrisy.

In Ignatian spirituality there is nothing that you have to put in a box and hide. Nothing has to be feared. Nothing has to be hidden away. Everything can be opened up

Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. —Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Merton wrote, "Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: the false self." With his typical insight, Merton identifies the false self as the person that we wish to present to the world, and the person we want the whole world to revolve around: Thus

lies, illusions, and self-serving excuses that cloud our minds make us less able to give and receive love.

But this is about more than just work, a job, or even a career. Vocation may have little to do with one's actual work. For the deepest vocation is to become who you are, to become your "true self," the person whom God created and calls you to be.

There I was, "striving to be something I would never want to be.

Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn't matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.

Whatever you is, Onion," he said, "be it full.

It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can't be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free? That pressed on my heart like a vise right then. Just mashed me down.

For me, living in the closet corroded my ability to have an honest, open relationship with my God, my loved ones, my constituency and myself.

I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts - protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul. The true me, my spiritual core, slipped further and further from reach.

But being in the closet uniquely assisted me in politics. From my first run for the state legislature until my election as governor, all too often I was not leading but following my best guess at public opinion.

A man isn't as good as his word, he's as good as his Actions.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. –Steve Jobs

is the world or the church is actually irrelevant. The point is simply that the devil is going to bring forward people (whether in the church or out of it) so much like true Christians, yet not Christians, that even the servants of God will not be able to tell them apart.

Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. Of course, it is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. Culture so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged by society that it has the appearance of open-ended activity, but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every case-like the socialist realism of Soviet art.

The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.

The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.

When I speak as the genius I am, I speak these words for the first time. To repeat words is to speak them as though another were saying them, in which case I am not saying them. To be the genius of my speech is to be the origin of my words, to say them for the first, and last, time. Even to repeat my own words is to say them as though I were another person in another time and place.

Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society.

When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within-and whoever touches me is touched as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are shattered by touching. Whoever touches and whoever is touched cannot but be surprised. (The unpredictability of this phenomenon is reflected in our reference to the insane as "touched.")

In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open, they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning, they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the geniuses of their own actions, to be whole.

Infinite sexuality does not focus its attention on certain parts or regions of the body. Infinite lovers have no "private parts." They do not regard their bodies as having secret zones that can be exposed or made accesible to others for special favors. It is not their bodies but their persons they make accesible to others.