Quotes About Authenticity

Why do you like me more when I was prouder and wilder, more full of words, yet emptier?

We are franker towards others than towards ourselves.

Is life not a hundred times too short for us to stifle ourselves.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

The hypocrite who always plays one and the same part ceases at last to be a hypocrite.

Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.

Joy was substance over optics," he said. "Joy was a long-term thinker. Joy was bold.

So if you're interested in what I have to say, keep reading. If you find something, some little thing that resonates and might do some good in your life, great. If you get to the end of this book (or to the middle, or to page 27 second paragraph down) and think the book is crap, leave it on the subway and forget about it. No problem.

Sincerity in this case is not just honesty. It's something deeper than that. The word is used to indicate a state that is completely open and unaffected. It is us, as we truly are, without any attempt to disguise ourselves, even in the ways we usually disguise ourselves to ourselves.

You're going to lose your life anyway. It may be now. It may be decades from now. But at some point it's going to happen, and you have no idea when or how. So it's important to be true to yourself at every moment.

We are exactly the truth of what we are — what the universe is — right here and now. Yet we need to do some work to truly become what we already are.

There's no comparison between someone who has their own real experience and someone who just reads about the experiences of others.

You know what Mars is? It's like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago--don't know if you ever had one--they called them kaleidoscopes, bits of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that's Mars. Enjoy it. Don't ask it to be nothing else but what it is.

Blunders, no, only friendship binds us to honesty - attracting crypts of mushrooms in the wake of our snowboards.

Blackburn thought that any band that believed it's lyrics were crucial was kidding itself. Kids out on Saturday night wanted to drink, dance and yell "WOOOO!" and have sex with somebody. They didn't want to hear a bad poet bare the angst in his tortured and immature soul. They could go to college for that shit.

Why do we go on and on about individuality being the very essence of who we are, and then accept a degrading level of conformity in virtually every facet of our lives?

Respect is earned, not demanded. It's the result of your actions, not your words.

Masterful work always comes from putting a higher importance on originality over marketability.

What I'm looking for cannot be sold to me.

I suggest we learn to love ourselves before it's made illegal.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Christopher Reeve did such an amazing job that to give him some kind of accent or more bravado would have been wrong. Audiences wouldn't have responded to that either.

The only time you seem honest is when you're insulting someone!" "The only honest things I can say to you are insults.

In the end, I must proclaim that no good can be achieved of false means. For the substance of our existence is not in the achievement, but in the method.