Quotes About Authenticity

A person's true nature is revealed at times of the greatest adversity.

The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must not look too good nor talk too wise.

You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.

Live an active life among people who are doing worthwhile things, keep eyes and ears and mind and heart open to absorb truth, and then tell of the things you know, as if you know them. The world will listen, for the world loves nothing so much as real life.

Experience has taught me," says Sam Wood, "that it is safest to drop, as quickly as possible, people who pretend to be what they aren't.

Try your best to develop an ability to let others look into your head and heart. Learn to make your thoughts, your ideas, clear to others, individually, in groups, in public. You will find, as you improve in your effort to do this, that you—your real self—are making an impression, an impact, on people such as you never made before.

People trudge through most days with little excitement in their lives. But our digital age provides so many opportunities to give people an authentic view of who you are or what your company strives to be, thus creating touch points of commonality that draw you into closer friendship with others.

A man usually has two reasons for doing a thing: the one that sounds good and the real one.

If theres something you want to see in others, make sure they can see it in you first

when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good.

He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.

The price of culture is a Lie.

Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

I love you was just three meaningless words without the actions that went with them

People are not like Tupperware, with their lids on securely.

If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

Don't write stories for teenagers or any other group," she advised. "Write them for yourself and let the audience that needs them find them.

If a book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

Life's absurd. Live authentically. Stop whining. Bam! I got into it.

re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body. [From the preface to Leaves Grass]

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.

You have not known what you are--you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return? The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;