Quotes About Authenticity

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.

Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.

I want to see you shoot the way you shout.

Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

For seldom shall she hear a tale So sad, so tender, yet so true.

All I would tell people is to hold on to what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find it on your own terms.

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.

English proverb

He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for low standards which he will then satisfy.

Take a winter as you find him and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him: and tolerating none in you, which is a great comfort in the long run.

One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

When one has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence.

Fair words butter no parsnips.

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

I have always suspected that correctness is the last refuge of those who have nothing to say.

I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd To its idolatries a patient knee.

Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.

Writers aren't exactly people, they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.