Quotes About Authenticity

Suzuki Roshi once said to his Sixties American students that the way they dressed- with beads, long hair, brightly colored clothes-they all looked alike. Shave your heads, wear black robes, he said- Ah, now I can see your uniqueness. Our ideas and intentions can mask and cover up a story; there is a life force that will declare itself if you let it. Get out of the way.

Begin to write in the dumb, awkward way an animal cries out in pain, and there you will find your intelligence, your words, your voice.

Our ideas and intentions can mask and cover up a story; there is a life force that will declare itself if you let it. Get out of the way.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.

There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.

Connection with self never felt so good!

Those who love only half of him do not live him at all.

Tom was okay, but we were just pretending to like each other, hoping that eventually, if we pretended hard enough, it would turn real. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't. But Jonah was already real. Even Matthew was real, though I'd never seen him. And they made me real.

Stop the B.S. (BLocking Your Spirit) and Start Living a Life You Love!

That's the biggest problem with personas. A false self can never rest. It looks like a real person, but a persona is actually just a hologram, a projected image, and it requires constant energy to keep that image up. A persona is afraid to go to sleep, because to sleep is to die.

Let's face it: the reason many guys have stopped telling the truth in church is because most churches actively discourage truthfulness. Even in Christian men's groups, the cost of candor is usually painfully high, the punitive response to it swift and decisive.

We love a good, hyped sound, but when it starts to sound insincere, that's when I lose interest. I hope that our music, even if it sounds polished, doesn't sound insincere.

As a songwriter I hate this whole, 'If it's a sad song, it has to sound like a sad song thing.' And that goes all the way back to my days with the Format. I'm an insane narcissist, so if I have to get something off my chest, I'll get something off my chest.

Lately, he had been thinking. He'd been thinking that his life didn't reflect everything going on inside his head.

better a live bird in the jungle of the body than two stuffed birds on the library table.

He sees that the majority of letters are profoundly humble pleas fpr moral and spiritual advixe, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examinatin shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not the perpetator.

To attain "success" without attaining positive self-esteem is to be condemned to feeling like an imposter anxiously awaiting exposure.

It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively--which means to live authentically--is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of their lives in hiding--from others and also from themselves.

Regardless of what we think we're teaching, we teach what we are.

It is painful to face the self we know we have never had the integrity to honor and assert.

It is humiliating to realize that when you drive yourself underground, when you fake who you are, often you do so for people you do not even like or respect.

No man, for any considerable time, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.