Quotes about Authenticity

when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.

I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity

And thus she made it impossible for me to roll out my sonorous phrases about 'elemental feelings,' the 'common stuff of humanity,' 'depths of the human heart,' and all those other phrases which support us in our belief that, however clever we may be on top, we are very serious, very profound and very humane underneath.

When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

It was as true… as turnips is. It was as true… as taxes is. And nothing's truer than them.

No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.

I am not at all respectable, and I don't want to be. Odd perhaps, but so it is!

I'm wrong in these clothes. I'm wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th' meshes.

When you see a man with a great deal of religion displayed in his shop window, you may depend upon it, he keeps a very small stock of it within

Live truth instead of professing it.