INDIVIDUALITY QUOTES
quotations about individuality
Individuality is, to the rational man, the same that breath, the circulation of blood, is to the animal.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is To Be Done?
It's hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.
DOLLY PARTON
attributed, How Dolly Parton Saved My Life
Ah, think not meanly of yourselves, and sink into no common mass of being, as if your individuality were ever destructible or not all significant. You are bounded and confined by the impassable limits of that mystery we call "ourselves."
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
ANAIS NIN
The Diary of Anais Nin
The thing is not to follow a pattern. Follow your own pattern of feeling and thought. The thing is to accept your own life and not try to live someone else’s life. Look, the thumbprint is not like any other, and the thumbprint is what you must go by.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1963
The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
JOHN STUART MILL
On Liberty
Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.
TOM ROBBINS
Jitterbug Perfume
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him keep step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you.
VINCENT O'SULLIVAN
The Next Room
Bring something incomprehensible into the world!
GILLES DELEUZE
Thousand Plateaus
At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thoughts Out of Season
Taking into account the public's regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in.
JANEANE GAROFALO
Feel This Book
Find your own way, open your treasure house, invent your own answer to the chaos.
GERTRUDE STEIN
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
SAUL ALINSKY
prologue, Rules for Radicals
Let each one turn his gaze inward and regard himself with awe and wonder, with mystery and reverence; let each one promulgate his own laws, his own theories; let each one work his own influence, his own havoc, his own miracles.
HENRY MILLER
The Cosmological Eye
What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
letter to Mary Russell Mitford, January 14, 1843
Every individuality is at bottom only a special error.
GEORGE BERKELEY
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
I would be better for me ... that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.
PLATO
Gorgias
Individuality, the more emphasized it is, the better it is for the social welfare; for individuality is the perfecting of a member of the whole body. Of course, if one be emphasized at the expense of others, there is wrong done to, and injury sustained by, the body; but the perfection of solidarity will consist in the simultaneous development to its highest pitch of the individuality of every member of society.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.
E. H. CHAPIN
Humanity in the City