authenticity quotes

If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.

I think that it’s okay to be mad at someone who hurt you. This isn’t about, like, the pageantry of trying to seem like nothing affects you.

Fear is present when we forget that we are a part of God’s divine design. Learning to experience authentic love means abandoning ego’s insistence that you have much to fear and that you are in an unfriendly world. You can make the decision to be free from fear and doubt and return to the brilliant light of love that is always with you.

I’ve never been shy or secretive with the fact that if you walk into my life, you may be walking onto a record.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

I can’t very well be teaching one way and living my life another way. What I do in life must be consistent with the things I say. And the same goes for you.

You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they’re not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don’t care about money, and that’s not my problem.

I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing.

Sometimes we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

We’re all insecure, aren’t we? I’m not walking around like I’m macho man or anything.

I don’t want to be fake. I’m just being me. And I have the power to break stereotypes and whatever useless rules that society puts on us.

It is very hard to not be able to engage with people in a real and honest way because they either want something from me, or they see me as something that I simply am not.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

I can’t pretend that I’m brave and that I can beat the whole world.

Don’t make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I’m not.

I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that.

Those outside the church expect followers of Christ to live differently, yet today many in church are chasing after the world – not to win them, but to be like them.

I’m here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don’t follow what you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

You’re not going to scare me into being somebody I don’t want to be.

I’m not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.

The hardest thing for – not only an artist but for anybody to do is look themselves in the mirror and acknowledge, you know, their own flaws and fears and imperfections and put them out there in the open for people to relate to it.

I’ve just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

For a creative writer possession of the ‚truth‘ is less important than emotional sincerity.

I wrote ‚Channel Orange‘ in two weeks. The end product wasn’t always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

I don’t know if it’s changing already with ‚Joanne,‘ but my intention is to bring people together that don’t know each other and that would maybe feel awkward, but somehow be brought together by the music. That’s what I wanted to do. Because that is pure and authentic to my family history and what I stand for.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

I’m a human being. I’ve got opinions, I’m not always right, I’m not always on time, I don’t always say things in the proper way, but my intentions are always extremely pure.

Jesus didn’t die for us so we could pretend to be something we’re not.

Some of the kids in school used to call my father a fake or a phony. That kind of thing brought on a few fights.

I’m totally myself.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

I never sell a book. I sell myself. And the way to sell yourself is to be an instrument of love.

Selling out is doing something you don’t really want to do for money. That’s what selling out is.

Whether I’m running on the beach without my shirt or whether I’m going out with my kids or going to church or going out to dinner – I don’t choose to insulate myself in engaging in real life. Hence, the public kind of almost knows me as much through my real life that they see through the rag mags.

Who I am on stage is very, very different to who I am in real life.

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

My life is real.

I always try to be myself. Ever since I was an introverted kid, I’d get on stage and be able to break out of my shell.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.

Once you’ve changed who you are or who you’ve portrayed in your music, the fans, they’ll catch it… Once I feel like the world knows me for anything else but my music, then I feel like I failed.

If you’re performing music that is not who you are or where you’re at, it is painful. It’s painful for the performer and for the audience.

I think people should feel encouraged to be themselves.

I always felt that if I was going to do a movie, I wanted it to be authentic.