Quotes About Authenticity

perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat

When women are gathered together with no men around, they don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be

But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with think, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.

God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality.

It might have been done before, but it hasn't been done by you!

Elizabeth Gilbert

All I could say was, I don't know what to do. I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.

Everyone makes their own path, and I must make mine. The Bhagavad Gita - and ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life perfectly. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly. It is mine.

Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy's distraction.

You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.

Anyway, at some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.

I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume.

Just say what you want to say . . . and say it with all your heart.

I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.

Go be whomever you want to be, then. Do whatever you want to do. Pursue whatever fascinates you and brings you to life.

At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.

I was not one for telling the truth back then. Truth telling was not my first instinct in any situation - especially in stressful situations. It took my many years to become an honest person, and I know why: because the truth is often terrifying. Once you introduce truth into a room, the room may never be the same again.

And what if people absolutely hate what you've created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest—as politely as you possibly can—that they go make their own fucking art.

What was there for Harper Lee to be afraid of, after all? Possibly just this: That she could not outdo Harper Lee.

When I don't know what I'm doing, I look like I don't know what I'm doing. When I'm excited or nervous, I look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost.

You are free, because everyone is too busy fussing over themselves to worry all that much about you. Go be whomever you want to be, then. Do whatever you want to do. Pursue whatever fascinates you and brings you to life. Create whatever you want to create—and let it be stupendously imperfect, because it's exceedingly likely that nobody will even notice. And that's awesome.

We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we're so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don't give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won't be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow." They

The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don't need to follow it, no matter what they say. No fashion trend is compulsory, remember—and if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person. Paris is all well and good, but we can't just follow Paris for the sake of Paris, now can we?

Looking for Truth is not some kind of spazzy free-for-all, not even during this, the great age of the spazzy free-for-all.