Quotes About Authenticity

You could be who you wanted to be in the city. You could be whoever you were deep inside. It was like a garden of people, the only place where I didn't feel alone in a crowd.

we have to fight them. The best way to do this is to be who you are, every part of you, the good and the bad, the sorrowful and the joyous. You can never run away. There is nowhere to run to. I think your mother knew that in the end, and that is why she came back here to be buried. We are who we are from the start.

She knows now that when you don't lose yourself in the bargain, you find you have double the love you started with, and that's one recipe that can't be tampered with.

Courage Tea as an antidote for fear, grief, and facing the world's trials, one cup reminds you to always be who you are.

Você não pode fingir que algo real não existe.

The story is always about searching for the truth, no matter what it might bring. Even when nothing was what it appeared to be, when everything hidden, there was a center not even I could run from: who I truly was, what I felt, what I was deep inside.

I told you not to park there," some woman would say to her husband outside a movie theater or a flea market, and those words would move Gillian to tears. How wonderful to say whatever you wanted without having to go over it in your mind, again and again, to make certain it wouldn't set him off.

that you must be yourself no matter what; anything else was a lie, and a denial of who you were would always cause grief. What you put out into the world came back to you threefold.

She never used a cookbook again—after all, there was no point in cooking for someone who couldn't tell the difference between a gâteau au chocolat and a defrosted Sara Lee cake.

He told me he wanted the chance to be in love again. He has no idea that being in love is bullshit. It's knowing someone down to their soul that matters. That's what love is. It's difficult and it's real and it doesn't change.

I'll pretend to be who they want me to be.' He grinned then, and she saw his youth. 'But it won't work. In the end I'll have to disappoint someone. Either them, or myself.

But why would a man in his right mind memorize another man's words instead of speaking his own? That's what a player does. Maria shrugged. He pretends to be someone he's not.

A system of morality tells us what to do and what not to do, but it cannot tell us what we should feel. Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated.

Narcissistic cathexis of the child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his false self. This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life.

Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent.

tragic and painful state of being separated from his true self, to which doctors refer offhandedly as depression.

Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated.

At first it will be mortifying to see that she is not always good, understanding, tolerant, controlled, and, above all, without needs, for these have been the basis of her self-respect.

What is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs, and although this certainly saves his life (by securing the mother's or the father's "love") at the time, it may nevertheless prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself.

In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place.

The answer is that we can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else. We can only be the people we are, and we cannot force our parents to love us. There are parents who can only love the mask their child wears.

A higher being dependent on inauthentic feelings dictated by morality is strongly reminiscent of the insecurity displayed by our frustrated and disoriented parents. Such a being can be called God only by people who have never questioned their own parents or thought about their dependency on them.

They are able to listen, to identify with others; they are outgoing, concerned, and usually less prone to illusions than the figures we see them encountering. As they have experienced honesty and unconditional affection in their early years, they are better able to cope with their lives than those who are fed on illusions and later have to fight to find out the truth about themselves, like Claudia, Anika, Helga, or Lilka.

Even as an older child, she was not allowed to say, or even to think: "I can be sad or happy whenever anything makes me sad or happy; I don't have to look cheerful for someone else, and I don't have to suppress my distress or anxiety to fit other people's needs. I can be angry and no one will die or get a headache because of it. I can rage when you hurt me, without losing you.