Quotes About Authenticity

Be true to yourself, to your best self.

He was really having a hard time with this. He was not a seductive kind of guy, and if he tried to be sexy, he was going to sound like Romeo, the porn version.

Who do you become when you've lost sight of who you are but the false you isn't one you can pretend to be anymore?

Just me, rocking the awk.

Who do you become when you've lost sight of who you are, but the false you isn't one you can pretend to be anymore?

You hear a lot about people who are afraid to die. Well, they're nothing compared to the ones who are afraid to live—people who go through life just making motions—and conventional motions at that.

I'm going to tell you something about myself. I pay my own way as I go through the world, and I want the privilege of living my own life. I left North Mesa because I couldn't do just that. I have my own code, my own creed, and my own ideas. I try to be true to them, all of them. I hate hypocrisy. I like fair play. I want to live my own life in my own way, and I'm willing to let other people live their lives in their way.

When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.

I loved you enough to accept you for what you are, not what I wanted you to be.

Before you try to keep up wiht the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.

The person has to learn to derive his self-esteem more from within himself and less from the opinions of others; he has to try to base it on real qualities and capacities, things he can make or do

Very few of us ever find our authentic talent—usually it is found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society rewards us for.

the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie.

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false.

He has to try to get as many ways of earning self-esteem as possible, to constantly broaden his skills, the things he genuinely takes pleasure in, in place of what others think he should take pleasure in.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.

Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.

Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together

You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know

I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way.