Quotes About Authenticity

As long as a person does not accept himself, he will always have this fear of being misunderstood and misconstrued by his environment;

Scherz ist die drittbeste Tarnung. Die zweitbeste: Sentimentalität. (...) Aber die beste und sicherste Tarnung (finde ich) ist immer noch die blanke und nackte Wahrheit. Komischerweise. Die glaubt niemand.

People are watching the way we act, more than they are listening to what we say.

Don't worry about having the right words; worry more about having the right heart. It's not eloquence he seeks, just honesty.

Heaven does not know you as the fellow with the nice suit or the woman with the big house or the kid with the new bike. Heaven knows your heart.

Our task is not to whitewash nor bloat the truth. Our task is to tell the truth. Period.

If you aren't you, we don't get you.

Your goal is not to live long, it's to live.

La oración es realmente así de sencilla. Resístete al impulso de complicarla. No te sientas orgulloso por las oraciones muy elaboradas. No pidas disculpas por las oraciones incoherentes. Nada de juegos. Sin encubrimientos. Simplemente sé sincero… sincero con Dios. Súbete a su regazo. Cuéntale todo lo que hay en tu corazón. O no le digas nada. Solo eleva tu corazón al cielo y declara: Padre… Papito…

Don't worry about skills you don't have. Don't covet strengths others do have. Just extract your uniqueness.

The most liberating of all thoughts is disregard or "disconcern" for what other people think. Famous mail-order impresario and entrepreneur J. Peterman wrote (in his autobiography Peterman Rides Again); "Once you realize that most people are keeping up appearances and putting on a show, their approval becomes less important." Excessive concern over what other people think inhibits personality more than any other factor.

It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.

I hate small talk with a passionate hatred. Why? I suppose because any meeting with another human being is collision for me now.

We have to break the mirror to be ourselves...

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my real life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.

What we have not has made us what we are. Those surface consolations have to go.

Now I become myself. Now I become myself. It's taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces

All aspiring writers say these things: I will not compromise and write a best seller!—as if they could! There may be a few totally faked-up books that sell, but on the whole I believe every writer writes as well as he can.

one of the privileges of old age was that no holds were barred. You were permitted to be absolutely honest.

I suppose I have a thing about old women. Their characters may be rather stylized, but once you get past mannerism, they are, well? how to put it? Transparent. It isn't worth it any longer to wear a mask.

feelings bore me. is that a crime

Wholeness, so far as statesmen go, may have something to do with speaking in one's own words. De Gaulle did not call in "writers"; the very idea is grotesque. The leader who allows others to speak for him is abdicating. Who is speaking via Nixon? Who wrote this phrase or that? One is never quite sure.

Love opens the doors into everything.. including, and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.