Quotes About Authenticity

I've never understood what people mean when they say they have to find themselves. We know who we are. The hard part is being that person. It's always so much easier to be someone else.

I've never understood what people mean when they say they have to find themselves. We know who we are. The hard part is being that person. It's always so much easier to be someone else.

In the broad field of Russian letters in the USSR, I was the one and only literary wolf. I was advised to dye my fur. Absurd advice. You can dye a wolf, clip a wolf - he still doesn't look like a poodle. - to Joseph Stalin, May 30, 1931

Druga ?wie?o?? to nonsens! ?wie?o?? bywa tylko jedna - pierwsza, i tym razem ostatnia.

DoÄŸruyu söylemek kolayd?r, ayr?ca insana keyif verir.

Ne obmanjuj makar samoga sebe.

A childish feeling, I admit, but, when we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.

I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers. ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…

Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.

In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.

Homo sentimentalis [...] a man who has raised feelings to a category of value. As soon as feelings are seen as value, everyone wants to feel; and because we all like to pride ourselves on our values, we have a tendency to show off our feelings.

It means what you are, wanting what you want and going after it without a sens od shame. People are slaves to rules.

he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.