Quotes About Authenticity

EVERY one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

Even though my natural acts are good they have a tendency, when they are only natural, to concentrate my faculties on the man that I am not, the one I cannot be, the false self in me, the character that God does not know. This is because I am born in selfishness. I am born self-centered. And this is original sin.

MANY poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves.

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person of false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself with glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.

Existential dread] is the profound awareness that one is capable of ultimate bad faith with himself and with others: that one is living a lie.

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality

When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve.

True solitude is a participation in the solitariness of God—Who is in all things. Solitude is not a matter of being something more than other men, except by accident: for those who cannot be alone cannot find their true being and they are less than themselves. Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death.

If lying and fabrication are psychologically harmful even in ordinary relations with other men (a sphere where a certain amount of falsification is not uncommon) all falsity is disastrous in any relation with the ground of our own being

We are warmed by fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul which is the principle of all our acts.

The more perfectly we are ourselves the more we are able to contribute to the good of the whole Church of God.

we too easily assume that we are our real selves, and that our choices are really the ones we want to make when, in fact, our acts of free choice are (though morally imputable, no doubt) largely dictated by psychological compulsions, flowing from our inordinate ideas of our own importance.

For me—the betrayal I have to look out for is that which would consist simply in attaching myself to "a cause" that happens to be operating at this time, and getting involved, and letting myself be carried along with it, simply making appropriate noises from time to time, at a distance.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

genuine strength arises only in a condition of vulnerability. The flagrant display and self-serving use of power are an admission of deep incapacity.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

True solitude is the home of the person, false solitude the refuge of the individualist.

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another mans city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life?

There are so many voices heard today asserting that one should have religion or believe, but all they mean is that one should associate himself, sign up with some religious group. Stand up and be counted. As if religion were somehow primarily a matter of gregariousness...

You discover that when you are doing the right work, you are the right person.

He who dares not offend cannot be honest.

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.

Don't commit original sin. Try and let her just be.