Quotes about authenticity

How can one person be more real than any other? Well some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are hiding — escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience — maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who are afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of liars hell. Some folks hide and some folks seek,and seeking when its mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous, can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look, and won't turn tail should they find it — and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway, because nothing, neither the terrible truth, nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth's sweet gas.

Sexual integrity means honestly recognizing our own impulses and desires and honoring them, whether or not we choose to act on them. If we value integrity, we must also value diversity in sexual expression and orientation, recognizing that there is no one truth, or one way, that fits everyone.

Sexuality is sacred because through it we make a connection with another self — but it is misused and perverted when it becomes an arena of power-over, a means of treating another — or oneself — as an object.

You can only really be yourself when you have nothing left to lose, see? That's a learning I made. It may sound dumb, but it ain't easy when your dreams roll up. Take note, you can feel jerksville lurking in back. And as we know, just by thinking it, you suffer it worse. The learning: potential assholeness when a dream comes true is relative to the amount of time you spent working up the dream. . It means I could even fucken puke.

You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

Nothing in this world is useless in the eyes of God. Not a leaf from a tree falls, not a hair from your head, not even an insect dies because it was of no use. Everything has a reason to exist... Don’t try to be useful. Try to be yourself: that is enough, and that makes all the difference. A life is never useless. Each soul that came down to Earth is here for a reason.

I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

"I'd rather be myself. Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly."

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.