Quotes About Authenticity

If you are doing something primarily for money and without a real emotional commitment, it will translate into something that lacks a soul and that has no connection to you. You may not see this, but you can be sure that the public will feel it and that they will receive your work in the same lackluster spirit it was created in.

Understand: people will tend to judge you based on your outward appearance. If you are not careful and simply assume that it is best to be yourself, they will begin to ascribe to you all kinds of qualities that have little to do with who you are but correspond to what they want to see.

Anyone who would spend years absorbing the techniques of their field, trying them out, mastering them, exploring and personalizing them, would inevitebly find their authentic voice and give birth to something unique and expressive

People who wear their hearts on their sleeves out in society are tiresome and embarrassing. Their sincerity notwithstanding, it is hard to take them seriously.

To think that by doing more you are doing better is a common blunder. It is never good to seem to be trying too hard—it is as if you were covering up some deficiency.

You will see the signs of this shadow leaking out in everyday life. If people take an action that seems out of character, you will take note: what often appears out of character is actually more of their true character.

by embracing the full picture of themselves, their self-love is more real and complete. From this stronger inner position, they can turn their attention outward more often and more easily. This attention goes in one of two directions, and sometimes both.

Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, "Become who you are by learning who you are.

Lo que la gente diga de sí misma no importa; dirá lo que sea. Ve lo que ha hecho; los actos no mienten.

Daily Law: What would you work on if no one was looking? If money were no object? TED Talk, "The Key to Transforming Yourself," October 23, 2013

Daily Law: Be brutally honest with yourself, aware of how your need to fit in can shape and warp your thinking. Does that anxiety or sense of outrage that we feel come completely from within, or is it inspired by the group?

The Laws of Human Nature, 14: Resist the Downward Pull of the Group—The Law of Conformity

Embrace Your Weirdness The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. —Coco Chanel

Daily Law: Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That's your source of power. Podcast Interview. Curious with Josh Peck. December 4, 2018

Imagine a person who never develops these acting skills, whose face instantly grimaces when he dislikes what you say or cannot suppress a yawn when you fail to entertain him, who always speaks his mind, who completely goes his own way in his ideas and style, who acts the same whether he's talking to his boss or to a child, and you have imagined a person who would be shunned, ridiculed, and despised.

Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels. Friends will say that they love your poetry, adore your music, envy your taste in clothes—maybe they mean it, often they do not.

Think of the workplace as a kind of theater in which you are always wearing a mask. (Reserve your most interesting and colorful thoughts for your friends, and for those whom you can trust outside work.)

Leaders who try to dissolve that distance through a false chumminess gradually lose the ability to inspire loyalty, fear, or love. Instead they elicit contempt.

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you.

You will also become humbler, realizing you're not superior to others in the way you had imagined. This will not make you feel guilty or weighed down by your self-awareness, but quite the opposite. You will accept yourself as a complete individual, embracing both the good and the bad, dropping your falsified self-image as a saint. You will feel relieved of your hypocrisies and free to be more yourself. People will be drawn to this quality in you.

Con demasiada frecuencia creemos que el poder cambia a la gente, cuando en realidad la muestra tal como es.

false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons—money, fame, attention, and so on. If it is attention we need, we often experience a kind of emptiness inside that we are hoping to fill with the false love of public approval. Because the field we choose does not correspond with our deepest inclinations, we rarely find the fulfillment that we crave.

You often do not know your friends as well as you imagine. Friends often agree on things in order to avoid an argument. They cover up their unpleasant qualities so as to not offend each other. They laugh extra hard at each other's jokes. Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels. Friends will say that they love your poetry, adore your music, envy your taste of clothes-- maybe they mean it, often they do not.

A crock of shit," Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing.