Quotes About Authenticity

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

The grown-up is only a thin coat of chocolate over the hard nut of the child. Whatever you were as a kid, you still are when the chocolate gets licked off or scraped off.

I don't give a shit about pretty, I informed her. I'm a superhero. Superheroes don't need pretty.

Suicide feels like One Authentic Thing. Suicide feels like Meaning of Life. Suicide feels like having the Last Word. Suicide feels like stopping Time Forever. But of course this is all just delusion, too! Suicide is just part of life, so it is part of the delusion.

Feeling is the important part. You don't have to make a big deal about it.

The more stars in your itinerary, the less likely you are to find the real life of another country.

He hadn't lied. He honestly liked her house, for the same reasons he was drawn to the woman. There was no artifice about either one.

I wonder why people you have to meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it.

Everyone's running around comparing wounds, like bodybuilders showing off their muscles. And what's really unbelievable is that they really believe they can heal the wounds like that, just by putting them on display.

That was with me for years—feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it—slice yourself open and all you'll find is blood and muscle and bone. . . .

I don't really know how to say it, but if you're really honestly having fun, you're not supposed to think and look for things right in the middle of it, am I right?

I hate people who break down crying when you're trying to talk about something important. Men and women both. You can't trust weepy people. They think they're the center of the world, and that their tears can absolve them of anything.

talking with him made me realize I wasn't the only one. "I mean, it's like everybody's acting out a part," he'd tell me. "They say stuff they don't really think, or do stuff they don't really feel like doing, and after a while you find yourself acting the same way.

Find something that, when you're doing it, makes you feel like you don't have anywhere to go. If you don't find it, you'll end up having to go somewhere you don't want to.

She was an ordinary person. But by 'ordinary' I just mean that she didn't have any need to dramatize herself. It's not a criticism. I don't think of the urge to perform as something that adds to a person's character. If anything, it's a defect, especially when it's coupled with a need to compete.

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?

The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.

Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!

The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.

even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.

About as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another piece of paper which had been used to wrap up a few tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times.

To be human, is not a fact, but a task.

Be that self that one is