1,114 Quotes About Authenticity

I feel I need a holiday, a very long holiday, as I have told you before. Probably a permanent holiday: I don't expect I shall return. in fact, I don't mean to, and I have made all arrangements....I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something.'Bilbo

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing compared to self-swindlers.

In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.

Williams was complex and tortured. He was not a saint but had his saintly side, which came and went, radiant and sincere as long as it lasted.

If my children think I'm genuine, no one else's opinion matters to me.

What you're willing to give tells you who you are. Not what you are willing to bargain for, or willing to be paid for - but what it is you are willing to give.

Let's burn our masks at midnightand as flickering flames ascend,under the witness of star-clouds,let us vow to reclaim our true selves.Done with hiding and weary of lying,we'll reconcile without and within.Then, like naked squint-eyed newborns,we'll greet the glorious birth of dawn;blinking at the blazing, wondrous colorswe somehow failed to notice before.

There was no one for you to impress and no one for you to offend. You were right there and I was afraid of how real you were, which made me question my own level of authenticity. I'd take off my clothes on the beach or spill my guts to a girl I'd never met on the bus, thinking I was uncensored and open, but I wasn't always real if I wanted someone to like me. I gravitated to those who withheld or told me who they thought I was.

The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting', he thought, 'but as long as it remains in its naked form we observe it from the height of our spiritual life and despise it; and - whether one has fallen or resisted - one remains what one was before. But when that same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and aesthetic feeling and demands our worship - then we are swallowed up by it completely and worship animalism, no longer distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful!