Quotes About Authenticity

Don't persuade, defend or interrupt. Be curious, be conversational, be real. And listen.

Only people who claim their own voice can hear the true song of another.

We stood in silence, and then the long-haired man repeated, "You are in pain. Do you know why?" "No, why?" I asked, even though I certainly did know why. "Because you are afraid." "Afraid of what?" "Afraid of yourself," the man said, placing his hand on his chest and patting his heart. "You are afraid to feel your real feelings. You are afraid to want what you really want. What do you want?

Being true to that self involves sifting through the layers of bad advice and unreasonable expectations of others. It requires seeing through your own delusions of grandeur or your fear of failure or your impostor syndrome or your conviction that there is something uniquely and obviously screwed up about your particular self.

So," I asked again, "if mistakes provide the best opportunity for discovery and evolution, why do we go around trying to look so sure of ourselves all the time?" I invited the crowd of left-brain thinkers to put

Face your embarrassment at being human, and you'll uncover a deep well of passion and compassion. It's a great power, your Open Secret. When your heart is undefended, you make it safe for whomever you meet to put down his burden of hiding, and then you both can walk through the open door.

People who are placed on a pedestal are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off. —Roxane Gay

the man was right: It was time for me to find out what I really wanted—not what my husband wanted, not what I thought my children needed, not what my parents expected, not what society said was good or bad. It was time for me to step boldly into the fullness of life, with all of its dangers and all of its promises. Remaining tight in a bud had become a kind of death. The time had come to blossom.

We are in search of our most authentic, vital, generous, and wise self.

To trust who our child is, and not who we think he should be or what the world wants him to be—that perhaps is the single greatest gift a parent can give.

A Twice-Born person pays attention when the soul pokes its head through the clouds of a half-lived life. Whether through choice or calamity, the Twice-Born person goes into the woods, loses the straight way, makes mistakes, suffers loss, and confronts that which needs to change within himself in order to live a more genuine and radiant life. But

Rumi speaks of the Open Secret. He says that each one of us is trying to hide a secret—not a big bad secret, but a more subtle and pervasive one.

It's easy to remain blind about ourselves when we stay within the safety zone—among people who are just like us, in a place that looks like home. We can trick ourselves into thinking that we are far more open-minded and bighearted than we really are. It's when we must walk our talk in the complex landscape of a messy life that self-righteous ideals are whittled down into the honest truth.

The rarest thing in the world is a woman who is pleased with photographs of herself.

Przed chwil? jeszcze ubrana, a teraz naga, jakby to by?a najbardziej naturalna rzecz na ?wiecie.

Everything in my life that I value has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say.

I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I'm fine, good night, please, thank you, you're welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them.

He shouldn't want to see her, but he did. He shouldn't want to know how she felt, how she tasted, but he did. He shouldn't want to know what food she liked or what she thought about when she was alone. He shouldn't want to know what her favorite music was or what she did when she wasn't modeling, if she did anything at all, but he did. He wanted to know everything there was to know about Razel D'Punz; the real Razel. No makeup. No costumes. No lights or camera.

My family stood right in front of me, talking and smiling. I felt like I was viewing one of those cheesy ad shots for camera companies. The ones I looked at and thought, fake, because no one's family ever looked that happy. Yet, the perfect family moment bloomed right before my eyes, and I wasn't a part of it.

You don't need to live up to someone else's standards. If you live up to your own, you will do perfectly well.

Address only those problems that are true problems to you, and don't create or imagine problems because someone else thinks you have them, no matter if that person is family, friend, or expert.

The problem with information on the Internet is that it is hard to verify its authenticity." —Abraham Lincoln.     ââ'¬Â¢

I once thought that being liked was important. Now I know that *Loving Myself* is paramount!

I only have one tip on how to get respect. Rather than speaking your mind, speak from the heart.