Quotes About Authenticity

We are so many selves. It's not just the long-ago child within us who needs tenderness and inclusion, but the person we were last year, wanted to be yesterday, tried to become in one job or in one winter, in one love affair or in one house where even now, we can close our eyes and smell the rooms. What brings together these ever-shifting selves of infinite reactions and returnings is this: There is always one true inner voice. Trust it.

To write is to bring an inner voice into the outer world, to believe that our thoughts are worth entering the thinking of others, and to make real what has never existed in quite the same way before. What could be a better path to self-value than that?

Laughter is the only free emotion-the only one that can't be compelled.p.181

Whatever you want to do, just do it. Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.

I pray for the courage To walk naked At any age To wear red and purple, To be unladylike, Inappropriate, Scandalous and incorrect To the very end.

Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don't have to put on an act. If I'm not feminine enough for someone, I don't care, because femininity is different in everyone's mind.

The media are not reality; reality is reality.

You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.

Many are looking for the right person. Too few are trying to be the right person.

You're always the person you were when you were born. You just keep finding new ways to express it.

Don't worry, honey," she said to me comfortingly, "it's important for someone who could play the game—and win—to say: 'The game isn't worth shit.'

Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice.

Taking to the road - by which I mean letting the road take you - changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories - in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. It's right up there with life-threatening emergencies and truly mutual sex as a way of being fully alive in the present.

If I had one piece of advice to give to young girls, I would say, "Don't listen to my advice. Listen to the voice inside." It's not important that they know who I am, it's important that they know who they are.

Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. It's right up there with life-threatening emergencies and truly mutual sex as a way of being fully alive in the present.

We don't win by imitating what we're against.

Humbled by this response and looking for advice on my own future now that I'm past seventy, I ask her how she has remained herself all these years. She looks at me as if at a slow pupil. "You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.

Now I see a few campuses that are honest

God challenged me to match my outsides with my insides. I had to reevaluate my priorities and my expectations for myself. It was a time of brutal honesty, loneliness, and shattered pride. But it was drenched in a message of hope and redemption.

I'm learning that I don't have to prove myself. And despite my superwoman complex, which got me into all kinds of situations, I'm not able to do all things.

Achieving honest success is not as hard as some things, some which impede it.

Choose truth, start serving your interest.

Falsity is the most powerful thing on earth. Truth is the most valuable thing in the world.

Go with the truth, the right not what suits you. Because what suits you doesn't suit you if it's not right, the truth.