Quotes About Authenticity

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do

There can be no happiness if the things we believe are different than the things we do.

I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

You deserve the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts.

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

i was born a bitch. i was born a painter.

What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are'.

Become who you are!

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. Good is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a common good! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.

I am one thing, my writings are another.

They call you heartless; but you have a heart and I love you for being ashamed to show it.

Of all that is written I love only what a man has written in his own blood.

Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.

The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's.

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

Every profound spirit needs a mask

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.

inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.