Quotes About Authenticity

You cannot experience yourself as what you are until you've encountered what you are not

The only real experience that counts, is your own.

The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.

You can have the right kind of experience and the wrong kind of experience. Mine is rooted in the real lives of real people, and it will bring real results if we have the courage to change.

For me, the more I live, the more I need to write. The more I push myself to really live and really experience things and step outside of my comfort zone, the more the songs are allowed to flow.

In my experience, it's much easier to act like a Christian than it is to react like one. Anyone can put on an act. But your reactions reveal what is really in your heart.

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

Nothing is true in self-discovery unless it is true in your own experience. This is the only protection against the robot levels of the mind.

I never deny a true experience in one shot.

It's like, you know, it doesn't matter what you do, even if you try to replicate an experience down to every last detail, it'll never be the way it was when it happened naturally the first time.

That seems to me the greatest American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.

Nothing I ever wrote had a message. It was just my own personal experience.

Imagine if the whole point of this experience on planet Earth was to just open ourselves up more fully to who we really are, without filters, without masks, without any restrictions.

There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform

My job is to portray real human beings and real human experiences, and if I haven't had a real human experience myself outside of the film industry, how am I going to be able to do that?

I try to keep myself grounded and to stay true to who I am through every experience, positive or negative.

One has to taste an experience for oneself and find out if the thing is genuine or helpful. Then, before discarding something, one has to go further, so that one gets firsthand experience.

I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. I just want (the audience) to have an experience that moves them.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

I feel like there's a hunger in the culture now for the live experience maybe as a counterpoint to the more sort of synthetic lives that we've been living.

The female experience is different from that of the male, and if, as a male writer, you cannot accept that basic premise, then you will never, ever, be able to write women well.

You are perfect, whole and complete. You needn't add anything to yourself to experience your true power.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.