Quotes About Authenticity

True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true.

I do not care for socially recognizable success. I only value that success which I can feel within me, which satisfies me, and which basically stems from self-knowledge.

The purpose of the false self is to defend against pain - not deal with reality

Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters.

Freedom is knowing who you really are.

Once you have identified and confirmed that four to six people agree to endorse you, I advise you to write the reference statements yourself! Athletes and celebrities do not write the advertisements for the products and services they endorse. And your "endorsers" should not write the advertisements for you, either! I suggest you write the testimonial and then send it to your references so they can review the statement and make whatever edits they may want to make.

Presence is a noun, not a verb; it is a state of being, not doing. States of being are not highly valued in a culture that places a high priority on doing. Yet, true presence or "being with" another person carries with it a silent power.

That's what I love about the short story. You are naked on the page. There is nowhere to hide.

The road to profitability is paved with credibility. Credibility is something you earn by how you market, where you market, how you treat people, how you act, and your overall level of professionalism. Away from the business arena, the term is street cred, and it's the road to respect.

All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshakable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

How do you get a human to think you're caring? The obvious way is actually to care.

Part of why I love these angry, straight, white punks is that they are stripping the dharma of its bullshit, and applying it to contexts and styles that, even if they aren't mine, are at least different from the norm.

What some folks don't understand about the closet is that it's not just a set of walls around sexual behavior. It's a net of lies that affects absolutely everything in one's life: how you dress, who you befriend, how you walk, how you talk. And how you love.

I like reality. It tastes like bread.

Our entire life - consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

Rien n'est vrai que ce qu'on ne dit pas...

Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.

Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.

All societies end up wearing masks.

America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.

Because no matter what you say in life, the truth will always be the truth. You know when someone is telling the truth, you look in the eyes. I have a tendency to believe people.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.