Quotes About Authenticity

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture.

I'm taking a big risk by coming clean, but the pressure of hiding my true self done really took a toll on me and I can't take too much more.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

The fashionable woman wears clothes. The clothes don't wear her.

The living need the truth, before rumor pollutes it.

I now know something about myself which I have been suspecting for years, if I had had the honesty to admit it. I ought to be frightened and ashamed, but I am not.

Uno no teme una conversación simplemente por el miedo a que se vuelva intensa. Pero la intensidad puede constituir un poderoso disolvente de superficies protectoras finas y frágiles.

If there is any irreverence in my own work, I hope it is the irreverence I bear in mistrusting my own sincere self, which then sincerely mistrusts the irreverent me. If there is a bottom to this, I think it is a life's work.

Prudent people are very happy 'tis an exceeding fine thing, that's certain, but I was born without it, and shall retain to my day of Death the Humour of saying what I think.

No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath.

I will eat what I want and look as I please and laugh as loud as I like and use the wrong fork and lick my knife.

We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What makes us who we are? If we stop for a moment and think, Of what do I consist? what is the answer we hear?

The sense that we are only the sum of our parts—whatever we achieve, however we appear, whatever we own, however we try to prove ourselves—is not a good sense. It's an existential crisis: Do I even exist? If you take away the masks I wear, is there only blank space underneath?

I can't say no, I can't slow down, I have to keep going or they'll find out I'm a little kid in grownup's clothes, and a fraud.

He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.

Women are repeatedly accused of taking things personally. I cannot see any other honest way of taking them.

In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.

Sometimes you sit around Don't know what to do, don't know where you're going to All you have to be is you What else can you do.

I tried to be what you wanted me to be But you didn't want a girl you wanted MACHINE ... I can't be part of this machine I got too much heart to keep it in I can't be part of your machine I promise this is not the end

If you find yourself to be a sort of an abrasive type of person, perhaps you might try to be gentle, because the truth is that gentleness and kindness are a lot more powerful than we are led to believe. And if you are like this, and people are telling you it doesn't work, don't listen to them do what you know is right.

To fully express the true self is at best a calculated risk.

it is the desire of the gifted person to live authentically and not suppress the First Nature traits that produce what some consider aberrant behavior.

The children never troubled themselves about whether they were fixable or not, as they did not consider themselves broken in the first place. You may decide for yourself what to think about it, but it is worth remembering that often people who are told they need fixing are perfectly fine as they are. It is our own narrow notion of how things ought to be that is truly in need of repair.

Something born from human pride and the quest for pleasure cannot be considered true culture.