Quotes About Authenticity

IF WE TRY to block off or deny a big part of what we experience, our wakeful, connected relationship to ourselves gets sharply whittled down. How then can we possibly feel alive?

It's tough to have an authentic relationship with awe in the age of awesome, a word that has become so overused as to be drained of its meaning.

We have to know ourselves to know where we end and another person begins, and we have to develop the skills to navigate the space between us. Or else we will seek wholeness through false means that honor neither us nor those we love.

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes

So often we operate from ideas of love that don't fit our reality.

The costs of keeping secrets include our growing isolation due to fear of detection and the ways we shut down inside to avoid feeling the effects of our behavior. We can never afford to be truly seen and known—even by ourselves.

Letting go is actually a healthy foundation upon which we can open up to real love—to giving, receiving, and experiencing it authentically and organically.

Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings.

real love seeks to find authentic life, to uncurl and blossom.

What's real strength Samson? he says. It's when you're a balanced man. When you can think as well as use your body. And you have to know who you are and be okay with it. If that means that you're not ripped or tough or a badass, then so be it, says Samson.

What I think we as the church lack, though, is a place to talk about how things really are now. In our desire to be an inspiration to one another we often veil what is true, because what is true is not always inspirational. But hurting believers whose lives are in tatters often need real help. If we were able to put aside our need for approval long enough to be authentic, then, surely, we would be living as the church.

The roles Reagan played in his earlier career were an apprenticeship for his original contribution to American government, the creation of a "performance president" who fashioned illusion (a tough leader who had learned to throw a crisp salute) from inauthenticity (almost persuading himself that he had been present when inmates were freed from concentration camps).

The techniques developed for the marketplace have been adapted by political consultants and their media experts. The result has been the pollution of the ecology of politics by the inauthentic politics of misrepresentative government, claiming to be what it is not, compassionate and conservative, god-fearing and moral.

An authentic politics is not univocal; there will always be contested views about actuality, and how it is to be understood and acted upon. But it makes a great deal of difference if the parties concerned can assume that each has made a good-faith effort to speak truthfully.

One should not want to be anything but what one is, because it creates unhappiness.

If it's fiction, then it better be true.

I was emotionally erect.

Don't live up to your stereotypes.

Of course, you can't lie forever. Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint.

This is who I am. This is who I have always been. I am in pain. I am always in pain. But I always find a way to the story. And I always find my way home.

Man, I've always cried too easily. I cry when I'm happy or sad. I cry when I'm angry. I cry because I'm crying. It's weak. It's the opposite of warrior.

I'm not an Indian warrior chief. I'm not some demure little Indian woman healer talking spider this, spider that, am I? I'm not babbling about the four directions. Or the two-legged, four-legged, and winged. I'm talking like a twentieth-century Indian woman. Hell, a twenty-first century Indian, and you can't handle it, you wimp.

She knew Indians were obsessed with authenticity. Colonized, genocided, exiled, Indians formed their identities by questioning the identities of other Indians. Self-hating

I'd wanted to say something epic and honest. But epics are rarely honest, and honesty should never be epic.