individual authenticity Quotes

You can't please everyone. Just because I don't behave a certain way, some folks will say you don't have any street cred. I've pretty much had to put up with that since I was a little kid, just because I was raised to communicate in a certain fashion. Some people didn't like it.

For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than a person who tries to guess what the great American public would like, makes a compromise for the first time, and falls flat on his face… I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else’s. That’s a difficult statement to live up to, but then I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.

Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.

Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flung in the face of life.

The incessant struggle of the mind to be true to itself, to absorb new truths, to grow, to overcome pressures--these are the painful portion of the independent thinker. Almost his sole reward is the satisfaction of integrity.

I am proud to tell Hollywood that I am a Christian. For the first time I am now free to be myself.

It says right here you've got to be saved to go to heaven. But the way I see it, you've only got to be yourself to go to hell.

It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.

But what really is immorality? And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?

It's your job to come up with compelling characters who speak to an individual authenticity. If I'm not interested in the characters, I can't go on. I have to be fascinated by them.

Don't look for someone in whom to believe. Believe in yourself. The only authentic authority is your own original nature.

I often think about the idea that augmentation has become the new normal. When you start to augment and filter yourself because you think you should, you're kind of putting your worth in other people's hands, rather than having that worth come from within.

I think so many people give us ideas of what we are. I think as women especially, because we're sensitive by nature, we're more vulnerable, we absorb other people's ideas about what we're supposed to think or who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to act.

The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity.

It is always brave to insist on undergoing transformations that feel necessary and right even when there are so many obstructions to doing so, including people and institutions who seek to pathologize or criminalize such important acts of self-definition. I know that for some feels less brave than necessary, but we all have to defend those necessities that allow us to live and breathe in the way that feels right to us. Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs – it is also not always what a trans person needs.

Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

I expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which, a man will get his coat as honestly and as perfectly fitting as a tree itsbark. Now our garments are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, i.e., of the devil, and to some extent react on us and poison us, like that shirt which Hercules put on.

But a big paradigm shift is staring us in the face. If I left things to someone else despite having my own thoughts on it, I wouldn't be true to myself.