Quotes About Authenticity

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

To kill your dreams because they are irresponsible is to irresponsible to yourself.

Make this a rule: always remember that your Censor's negative opinions are not the truth.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

each of us is our own country, an interesting place to visit. It is the accurate mapping out of our own creative interests that invites the term original. We are the origin of our art, its homeland. Viewed this way, originality is the process of remaining true to ourselves.

La creatividad florece cuando tenemos una sensación de seguridad y de autoaceptación.

Be careful to safeguard your newly recovering artist. Often, creativity is blocked by our falling in with other people's plans for us. We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn't. It makes us frustrated people.

As we gain - or regain - our creative identity, we lose the false self we are sustaining. The loss of this false self can feel traumatic: I don't know who I am anymore. I don't recognize me. Remember that the more you feel yourself to be terra incognita, the more certain you can be that the recovery process is working.

The trick to finding writing time, then, is to write from love and not with an eye to product. Don't try to write something perfect; just write. Don't try to write the whole megillah; just start the whole megillah.

Perfectionism is fear in a fancy dress.

Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others.

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples' models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open. SHAKTI GAWAIN

When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us.

For me, writing is like a good pair of pajamas -- comfortable. In our culture, writing is more often costumed up in a military outfit. We want our sentences to march in neat little rows, like well-behaved boarding-school children.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness. SHAKTI GAWAIN

We've all heard that the unexamined life is not worth living, but consider too that the unlived life is not worth examining ... Most of us are practiced at talking ourselves out of risk. We are skilled speculators on the probably pain of self-exposure.

I'm afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves on the page.

Illegitemus

Morty trusted trees far more than he did people. 'You know what a tree can and cannot give you,' he said in one interview. 'It's very straightforward that way. And I am not talking about that cruel Silverstein book, one of the only children's books I've ever thought ought to be banned.

Deep inside, she knew who she was, and that person was smart and kind and often even funny, but somehow her personality always got lost somewhere between her heart and her mouth, and she found herself saying the wrong thing or, more often, nothing at all.

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

I've always thought you are what you are and you shouldn't pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you're pretending to be.

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.