Quotes About Authenticity

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

Frustration is the beginning of the end of pretending.

You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for anybody's damn sermon,

Willa Cather said that she write best when she stopped trying to write and began simply to remember.

I prefer a man who is unskillful, who is an awkward writer, but who has something to say, who is dealing himself one time on every page.

Success in any endeavor depends on the degree to which it is an expression of your true self.

To maintain an opinion because it is thine, and not because it is true, is to prefer thyself above the truth.

The reality is more excellent than the report.

Sincerity is the LUXURY allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

It is easy in the world to live after the worlds opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.

'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

Do your thing & I shall know you.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.