Quotes About Authenticity

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.

Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.

There's nothing more embarrassing than a person who tries to guess what the great American public would like, makes a compromise for the first time, and falls flat on his face… I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else's. That's a difficult statement to live up to, but then I've always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.

i never told the truth so i can never tell a lie...

I've never met anyone who made it with a chick because they owned a Tom Waits album. I've got all three, and it's never helped me.

Honesty is the best image.

Love doesn't justify your actions. Your actions justify your love.

Most people choose appearance over reality.

The true character of a person is revealed under pressure.

There are two reasons why a person does something, one that sounds good and the real one.

Ma si? jedno ?ycie i moralnym obowi?zkiem jest prze?y? je w zgodzie ze sob?.

We had incense and rock'n'roll posters, and we sold records and rolling papers. People could just, like, hang out. We had a cool vibe going.

What Is Reality?

Esqueça o "culto-entretenimento". (...) Acho que o Senhor procura aqueles (poucos) que realmente O amam, não aqueles que só querem ser entretidos.

Precisamos nos arrepender por preparar cultos para agradar aos homens, ao invés de prestar a Deus a adoração que Ele merece.

M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.

We stand there with this big smile of respect between us. It's about as real a smile as girls can do for each other, considering we don't practice real smiling every day, you know, cause maybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.

Despite what you hear and say there will always be that one voice that will always be true to you.

And you know, whether it's drama or comedy, the best work is based on truth. It's just that, with comedy, the circumstances are just crazy-heightened, and you have these crazy things thrown at you. But you still have to do it truthfully, because that's where the humor comes from. So it's not that difficult to cross over.

The goal of the poem is not to conceal uncertainty and to deliver an airtight argument, or proclamation, or insight, not to arrive at some truth, but rather to display the nature of the speaker's "real-time" sensibility, including its tendency toward indecisiveness and self-contradiction.

In a world where, as one poet says, "people speak to each other mostly for profit," it is exhilarating to listen to a voice that is practicing disclosure without seeking advantage. That is intimate.

There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.