Quotes About Authenticity

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it — even if I have said it — unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives ... their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.... Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.

And what is it, thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.

A man can be honest in any sort of skin.

There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies or bland deceits.

Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.

It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.

It's not down in any map; true places never are.

If man will strike, strike through the mask!

Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.

Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!

To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!

Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu--and a recognizable part--unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return.

Tiktai tada mane ap?m? tikroji vienat?, ne užm?rytoji, netikroji, kuriai tamsu tarp sien? ir dar tamsiau už j?, o didžioji vienatv?, kuri yra šviesi kaip sodas be tvoros...

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

You can't be free if the cost of being you is too high.

What if it isn't so much Indianapolis trying to be Brooklyn, as Brooklyn wanting to capture something of Indianapolis?

I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another

Como os portões do Hades me é odioso aquele homem que esconde uma coisa na mente, mas diz outra.

My soul abhors a falsehood

Good preservation is a life preserver thrown to us in a shipwreck. Good preservation keeps us in touch with the graces of this life. It's bricks and mortar, yes. It's arguments about true colors and authenticity and representation. But true preservation is like the hand that shelters a fire from the wind. It protects the spark of life. -- Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax, Twice

La atmósfera es siempre el elemento más importante, por cuanto el criterio final de autenticidad de un texto no reside en su argumento, sino en la creación de un estado de ánimo determinado.