Quotes About Authenticity

All of life is relationship. We relate to people, things, and ideas, and our actions reflect the tone and substance of each relationship. How we relate to money, to the ideal of love, to nature, to our concept of death, and to our spouse reveals, in the moment, the truth of ourselves.

And although it hurts when people think less well of us than we deserve, our integrity, our self-respect, and our happiness do not ultimately depend upon the opinion of others. They depend upon our own conscience. We must be true to ourselves. And we must be true to others, whether they believe we are or not.

You can fail to tell the truth. But the truth cannot be a failure even if it's ignored or rejected. The report told the truth.

Being an effective person-centred counsellor is not so much a matter of possessing skills and knowledge, but of having a particular set of deeply-held values and beliefs and then being able to express these qualities in interactions with other people.

Vending. Not selling.

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me- nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

Love is scary! Taking a vow to love someone through sickness and health, for richer for poorer, forsaking all others, until death do us part, is the most terrifying experience a person can have. Why pretend any differently?

Mallory uses a measured, concerned-mom voice rather than a snake-oil-salesman voice.

There is no artifice, no manipulation, no games.

she's on brand even when she's having a breakdown.

She has new hair and new boobs, but her insides are still rotten.

Secrets are lies! They're lies!

Cash avoids group tours for a reason: they turn even the most authentic experiences into a Disneyland ride. It's unavoidable, he

Our psychological being has been severed from our biological selves for so long that we are completely cut off from our true natures.

Why so profane, ask the bookclubbers? Because we are talking here about death, and fuck you if you don't like it: You're going to die, too. This is serious. Fuck fuck fuck.

No scrim, no filter, no bullshit. She wasn't all bound up in there, gagged and furious and resentful beneath some high-pitched shrink-wrapped mess of pleasantry.

A deceptively simple blues for when you need to be brought back to earth, reminded who you are. The song opened and opened and kept on opening. You could dance to it, drop down into your pelvis, let it make you funnier, funkier, smarter, skankier, snarkier, stankier. Listen to how smart this girl is! How self-aware and funny. A step ahead of everyone else.

A special voice, an arresting voice, impossible to ignore. She didn't always hit precise notes—she wasn't some formalist, some scientist, some striver—but she sang from her gut and she meant it. Her voice a living organism: no song ever, ever the same twice.

I fear that this is what long term relationships are all about, at base: full-time role-playing, memorized and inhabited.

was so proud that night, so self-possessed, standing tall, fully inhabited. I owned myself, felt fully mine to give.

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

It is very important that you only do what you love to do. you may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do. Otherwise, you will live your life as a prostitute, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived. and you will not have a pleasant death.

We think sometimes we're only drawn to the good, but we're actually drawn to the authentic. We like people who are real more than those who hide their true selves under layers of artificial niceties

It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.