Quotes About Authenticity

Before you can be anything, you have to be yourself. That's the hardest thing to find.

How does it happen that in life as in literature, rebellion, however pure, has something false about it, whereas resignation, however tainted with listlessness, always gives the impression of authenticity

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

Don't be mysterious; there isn't the time.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness, one comes for life!

Aziz winked at him slowly and said: "...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design… there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own.

Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish tother from which.

I believed in a return to Nature once. But how can we return to Nature when we have never been with her? Today, I believe that we must discover Nature. After many conquests we shall attain simplicity. It is our heritage.

She was no longer examining life, but being examined by it; she had become a real person.

He questioned Maurice, who, when he grasped the point, was understood to reply that deeds are more important than words.

I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere.

I am swathed in cant', she thought, 'and it is good for me to be stripped of it.

He had dulled his craving for verbal truth and cared chiefly for truth of mood.

They had tried to reproduce their own attitude to life upon the stage, and to dress up as the middle-class English people they actually were.

When real things are so wonderful, what is the point of pretending?

Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, 'I am I.

Because we think it improves our characters. But he is kind to people because he loves them; and they find him out, and are offended, or frightened.

We are not in the law courts. There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

I don't believe in suiting my conversation to my company

If they were hypocrites they did not know it, and their hypocrisy had every chance of setting and of becoming true.