Quotes About Authenticity

The cultural authenticity of cloth arises not from the purity of its origins but from the ways in which individuals and groups turn textiles to their own purposes. Consumers, not producers, determine the meaning and value of textiles.

Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people...Think of things in themselves.

It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.

Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt.

Be truthful, one would say, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.

What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.

for unless I am myself, I am nobody.

I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.

We are not as simple as our friends would have us to meet their ends.

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels

With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.

When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.

Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.

when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

I'll be blasted', he said, 'if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself