Quotes About Authenticity

is not the time you spend with someone, it is what happens in that time. I have known people for years, and yet never met the real person inside, if there is one. Others I have spoken with for only an hour or two, and yet what was said had meaning and honesty that will last forever.

Ask her her opinion of anything, and instead of judging what is appropriate to say, she will tell you what she really thinks.

Many people desire no more than a convention— the sharing of a home, a social position, children, and the wider family; they do not wish to share their thoughts or their leisure, above all they do not wish to reveal their inner selves, where dreams are held, where they may be known, and thus wounded. They will not take risks. In the end there is no generosity of soul, only safety. There is no giving where there may be cost.

I do not wish to be protected from life. I think we might miss a great deal more of the good, and the bad would find us anyway. At least the sense of emptiness would. I think I would rather eat something unpleasant now and then, than perish of starvation sitting at the table because I was afraid to try.

She would not want anyone she cared for to love a false reflection of her. After all, could there be a greater loneliness than that?

It's important to think of self-acceptance as something related to your present state. It means accepting yourself as you are at this very moment. It doesn't mean, "I would love myself more if I lost ten pounds," or "I accepted myself when I was 20 years younger.

Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel every particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share.---Forward to Kafka's Short stories

Because I show you my pain, I do not of necessity love you.

There is no normal life. There is only life.

Tell me–how old are you, Reuben? I'm thirty-eight. How is that for total honesty? Do you know many women who volunteer they're thirty-eight?

We seek to perfect what we are, not to constantly alter it. We seek to find something that is a true expression of our soul with which to shape what makes up our form. But there's no need for you to trouble yourself over these things.

At times I felt a huge exhilaration, a freedom from all falsehoods and conventions, all means by which a soul or body can be held hostage!

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't.

I see that you are capable of secrecy but quite incapable of a lie.

Você sabe qual é minha opinião sobre o choro? Acho que algumas pessoas precisam aprender a chorar. No entanto, uma vez que se tenha aprendido, uma vez que se saiba chorar de verdade, não há nada que chegue a seus pés. Sinto pena de quem não conhece o segredo. É como assobiar ou cantar.

He wanted the truth and knew he could not get it by hostile means.

You do not want secrets which can be ripped from your heart.

Do what it is your nature to do. This is but a taste of it. Do what it is your nature to do.

So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." "An absence of need for illusions," he said.

Dicen que ninguno de nosotros cambia realmente con el paso del tiempo, que sólo nos volvemos más como somos.

I can supply the thereness. You can't ask what's not there to give.

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.

He would always make her feel too big and too gruff and too shocking; she would forever be trying to watch her words when she was with him. He was not the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or worse.