Quotes About Authenticity

To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You always reveal yourself.

I think the worst way a writer can self-betray is by not being true to his or her experience of being alive. It's my belief, for what it's worth, that a lot of writers consign to the page what they think will meet with the approval, especially in the moral realm, of what their society has preached to them since they were children, almost all of which is utter bull####.

I know I am talking nonsense, but I'd rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real

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 you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image.

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!

We need people in our lives with whom we can be as open as possible. To have real conversations with people may seem like such a simple, obvious suggestion, but it involves courage and risk.

Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer.

Impressions and appearances that do not correspond to reality must be contrasted with others that do correspond to reality, or else the contrast between appearance and reality is meaningless.

If of a number of shreds of his sentences he can shape an oration, from all the world hee carries it awaie, although in truth it be no more than a fooles coat of many coulours. No inuention or matter haue they of theyr owne, but tacke vp a stile of his stale galimafries. The leaden headed Germanes first began this, and we Englishmen haue surfetted of their absurd imitation. I pittie Nizolius that had nothing to doe, but picke thrids ends out of an olde ouerworne garment.

Reputation is what men and women think of us. Character is what God and the angels know of us.

Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.

Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or anything else. Not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his writing.

He liked her stories for the same reason she told them—they should have happened.

I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.

While the supreme value of existentialist thought is commonly acknowledged to be freedom, its primary virtue is authenticity.

Authentic Christianity and the world are by definition at odds. For most Americans, Christianity has been watered down and rendered innocuous, like so much fast food. It has become easy, upbeat, convenient, and compatible. It does not require self-sacrifice, discipline, humility, and otherworldly outlook, a zeal for souls, a fear as well as love of God. There is little guilt and no punishment, and the payoff in heaven is virtually certain.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth — anonymously and posthumously.

It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.