Quotes About Authenticity

We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us. If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly.

If you sin against your soul, it is always at great cost. Work can be an attractive way of sinning deeply against the wildness and creativity of your own soul.

The most subversive invitation you could ever accept is the invitation to awaken to who you are and where you have landed.

One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that everyone is ripping off second hand thinking. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm and bring us home, and also challenge us.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.

I have learned myself painfully that you can only relate to someone if you somehow have the courage and the need to inhabit your own solitude. You can only relate out of your separateness, otherwise you are just using the other person to shield you from your own solitude.

an authentic life is a life that is aware of and willing to engage its own oppositions, and honorably inhabits that threshold where the light and darkness, the masculine and feminine and all the beginnings and endings of one's life engage.

One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become chief executive of the project you call your life, to have reverence always for the immensity that is inside you.

Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts. We should never forget that death is waiting for us

One of the questions that John loved to pose was "when was your last great conversation with someone?" Good conversation chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade, and it penetrates the depths so as to soar unto unfolding possibility.

Humility is the freedom to stop trying to be what we're not, or pretending to be what we're not, and accepting our "appropriate smallness.

C. S. Lewis wrote that in prayer we must "lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

A man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul.

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!

Always be. Never try to become. You can be anything you want, just don't work at becoming. Remember to be it.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

The first and absolute condition of the thing's ever becoming saleable is, that we shall make it without wanting to sell it; nay, rather with a determination not to sell it at any price, if once we get hold of it. Try to make your Art popular, cheap –

When I told my father I wasn't going to be a minister of any kind, he said that I should never take cover in life, that I should stand out in the wind. Feel it. I'm trying to do that.

I don't think it matters what age you are when you figure it out," Brous said. "I think the important thing is to figure it out before someone else tells you what you want to be, and they get it wrong.

I could not personally care less about whether JT Leroy turns out to be fictional or not. I find fictional people writing fiction no more or less objectionable than real people writing fiction, because it's fiction

Who are you and what medications aren't you taking?

Making people change because you can't deal with who they are isn't how it's supposed to be done. What needs to be done is for people to pull their heads out of their asses.

Yes, and I have training dealing with deep, existential questions," Dahl said. "The way I'm dealing with it right now is this: I don't care whether I really exist or don't, whether I'm real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate. That's something I can work on. It's what I'm working on now.

I thought I asked to dispense with bullshit." "There's bullshit and then there's bullshit, Lady Kiva." "Well, you're right about that, at least.