Quotes About Authenticity

the safest course seemed to be to stay within the sources of their own time, written at the moment by those who knew the men and witnessed their acts, and as much as possible to use the directly contemporary writings of the men themselves

No wreaths please—especially no hothouse flowers.Some common memento is better,something he prized and is known by:his old clothes—a few books perhaps.

but for the Girl Writing A Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

Too much of me was lost in the vision of what somebody else wanted me to be.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.

Walt Whitman was not the first to observe that we are all naked under our clothes, but he was one of the greatest, if not the first, to preach a gospel of nudity.

I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself. But all of it? The black truth, which we all know ourselves in our heats, or only the whity-brown truth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront? Even you [Mark Twain] won't tell the black heart's-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day the sun shown upon.

It comes down to this: Who am I? Am I my no-chemicals-added self, no matter how unhappy I may be? Or Should I swallow this pill, achieve tranquility and risk obliterating a certain essential part of me?

Exactly, what form this alteration has taken. I will never know. I don't feel sedated, jittery or drugged. I simply feel normal-as if I had been driving a car all these years with the parking brake on, and now it is off. I feel as if the real me has returned, perhaps all the way from childhood, where she lived before The Beast arrived.

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

I strongly believe that we are not put on this Earth just to accumulate victories and trophies and avoid failures; but rather to be whittled and sandpapered down until what's left is who we truly are

Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest." William Gaddis, The Recognitions.

Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil---the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

wrote: Rule 1: Clone like crazy. Rule 2: Hang out with people who are better than you. Rule 3: Treat life as a game, not as a survival contest or a battle to the death. Rule 4: Be in alignment with who you are; don't do what you don't want to do or what's not right for you. Rule 5: Live by an inner scorecard; don't worry about what others think of you; don't be defined by external validation.

Yet hypocrites are like tops that go no longer than they are whipped, but the sincere soul is ready and forward, it doth not want will to do a duty when it wants skill and strength how to do it.

Thy language will not be so trim and gaudy but thy soul and spirit may be as sound yea more upright, than many of those will be found who charm the ears of those that join with them by the music their words make.

Sincerity! it is the life of all our graces, and puts life into all our duties, and, as life makes beautiful and keeps the body sweet, so sincerity the soul and all it doth.

I do not say that to pray in secret amounts to an infallible character of sincerity—for hypocrisy may creep into our closet when the door is shut closest, as the frogs did into Pharaoh's bed-chamber.

I have heard say that diseases of the heart are seen in spots of the tongue, but the hypocrite can show a clear tongue and yet have a foul heart.

His subject thou art whom thou crownest in thy heart, and not whom thou flatterest with thy lips.