Quotes about individuality

Wendelin Van Draanen - Flipped

Some of us get dipped in flat, some in satin, some in gloss...." He turned to me. "But every once in a while, you find someone who's iridescent, and when you do, nothing will ever compare.

Harvey Fierstein -

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself.

Oliver James -

why are trying so hard to fit in, when you're born to stand out

Oscar Wilde -

I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!

C. JoyBell C. -

We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don't share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is n

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust: First Part

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.

Jess C. Scott - Tongue-Tied

Last night I was seriously considering whether I was a bisexual or not but I don’t think so though I’m not sure if I’d like to be and argh I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, if you like a person, you like the person, not their genitals.

Jess C. Scott - EyeLeash: A Blog Novel

My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.

Jess C. Scott - EyeLeash: A Blog Novel

V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.

Jess C. Scott - The Intern

When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.

Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

Coco Chanel -

It’s probably not just by chance that I’m alone. It would be very hard for a man to live with me, unless he’s terribly strong. And if he’s stronger than I, I’m the one who can’t live with him. … I’m neither smart nor stupid, but I don’t think I’m a run-of-the-mill person. I’ve been in business without being a businesswoman, I’ve loved without being a woman made only for love. The two men I’ve loved, I think, will remember me, on earth or in heaven, because men always remember a woman who caused

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book

Sleep my little baby-ohSleep until you wakenWhen you wake you'll see the worldIf I'm not mistaken...Kiss a loverDance a measure,Find your nameAnd buried treasure...Face your lifeIts pain, Its pleasure,Leave no path untaken.

Carl Sagan - Cosmos

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

Rita Mae Brown -

About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all.

Suzanne Gordon -

To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.

Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

You are not just for the right or left, but for what is right over the wrong.

John Stuart Mill - On Liberty

There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than betwe

Emil M. Cioran - History and Utopia

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

Walpola Rahula - What the Buddha Taught: Revised and Expanded Edition with Texts from Suttas and Dhammapada

There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found.

William S. Burroughs -

To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…

Sunday Adelaja - The Mountain of Ignorance

When your life gets to the stage of being mindful and concerned with impacting and blessing lives, then you are pursuing wholeness as an individual.

Mark Twain -

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

Bruce Lee -

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.

Sunday Adelaja - The Mountain of Ignorance

Each individual needs to be pregnant with the seed of purpose.

G.K. Chesterton - 1911-1913

There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.

Jess C. Scott - The Intern

Please, touch me, I pray.

Miguel Syjuco - Ilustrado

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

Robert Frost -

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.

Sarah Vowell - Take the Cannoli

We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.

Kurt Cobain -

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of who you are

Michel de Montaigne - The Complete Essays

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

Jim Morrison -

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.

Jean M. Auel -

Life is neither static nor unchanging. With no individuality, there can be no change, no adaptation and, in an inherently changing world, any species unable to adapt is also doomed.

Phil Lester -

Be yourself. Don't worry about what other people are thinking of you, because they're probably feeling the same kind of scared, horrible feelings that everyone does.

Criss Jami - Electric Personality

When you're the only sane person, you look like the only insane person.

Gilles Deleuze - A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

Azar Nafisi - Reading Lolita in Tehran

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

Red Haircrow -

Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.

Joss Whedon - Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog: The Book

It may not feel too classy, begging just to eat But you know who does that?Lassie, and she always gets a treat So you wonder what your part is Because you're homeless and depressed But home is where the heart is So your real home's in your chest Everyone's a hero in their own way Everyone's got villains they must face They're not as cool as mine But folks you know it's fine to know your place Everyone's a hero in their own way In their own not-that-heroic way So I thank my girlfriend Penny Yeah,

C. JoyBell C. -

I don't fit into any stereotypes. And I like myself that way.

Hugo Hamilton - The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.

Oprah Winfrey -

I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that's as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.

Lewis Black - Me of Little Faith

Each of us is full of shit in our own special way. We are all shitty little snowflakes dancing in the universe.

Phil Lester -

Be yourself. Don't worry about what other people are thinking of you.

Tom Waits -

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one da

George Carlin -

I often warn people: "Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, 'There is no "I" in team.' What you should tell them is, 'Maybe not. But there is an "I" in independence, individuality and integrity.

James Rozoff -

There is no greater thing than to be oneself, and it is never too late to do so.

Curtis Tyrone Jones -

You can'tassume i'min bad shapejust becausei've run out ofthe energy toimpressyou.

Ayn Rand - Anthem

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.

C. JoyBell C. -

I believe in going with the flow. I don't believe in fighting against the flow. You ride on your river and you go with the tides and the flow. But it has to be your river, not someone else's. Everyone has their own river, and you don't need to swim,float,sail on their's, but you need to be in your own river and you need to go with it. And I don't believe in fighting the wind. You go and you fly with your wind. Let everyone else catch their own gusts of wind and let them fly with their own gusts

James Baldwin -

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

A truly good person will speak truth, act with truth, and stand for Truth. A truly good person is not afraid to think from their heart; therefore, allowing nonconformist decisions, viewpoints, and perspectives to lead their life. By following their heart, they stand with their conscience, and only with God.

Criss Jami - Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

Christ delves far beyond the means of superficiality, not simply because of his immaculate love, but also because he considers the distinct cases of each individual rather than withholding a broadened perception by use of stereotypes.

Jess C. Scott - EyeLeash: A Blog Novel

I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?

William Golding -

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.

Cristina Marrero -

I would rather die an individual than live my life as a clone.

C.G. Jung - The Undiscovered Self

It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else.

Amitav Chowdhury -

Individuality should not translate to narcissism. Realizing the strength of individuality is an accomplishment while being narcissistic is a failure.

Peter Marshall - Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

With their concern for personal autonomy and individual freedom, anarchists more than any other socialists are aware of the inhumanity of both physical punishment and manipulative cure for anti-social members of the community. They look to reasoned argument and friendly treatment to deal with criminals and wish to respect their humanity and individuality.

Swami Dhyan Giten -

Society destroys your individuality, your soul.

Max Stirner - The Ego and Its Own

You call me the unhuman," it might say to him, "and so I really am—for you; but I am so only because you bring me into opposition to the human, and I could despise myself only so long as I let myself be hypnotized into this opposition. I was contemptible because I sought my 'better self' outside me; I was the unhuman because I dreamed of the 'human'; I resembled the pious who hunger for their 'true self' and always remain 'poor sinners'; I thought of myself only in comparison to another; enough,

Raheel Farooq -

Humans are one, not divided, but multiplied into many.

André Gide - The Immoralist

Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitati

Gina Adel -

People who are different are beautiful. Those who follow society are boring.

C.G. Jung -

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.

Gyula Krúdy - Sunflower

I’d love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn’t bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree’s.

Hope Solo -

One thing I've learned in life is that I can speak for myself, that I can fight my own battles. I don't like anyone telling me how I'm supposed to feel or think or what I'm supposed to say.

Michelle Tea - Valencia

I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse.

Marty Rubin -

A chain grows weaker with each new link.

Henry David Thoreau - On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Leon Trotsky - History of the Russian Revolution

Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of “individuality” lost.

David Bedrick - Talking Back to Dr. Phil: Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology

Families can also be divided into subgroups with different values, perspectives, and and communication styles, even if a subgroup consists of only one individual.

Kat Von D. - and Tattooing

To me, the haircut represented beauty and strength, that I was a woman who would live her life without the boundaries imposed upon her by other people.

Rabih Alameddine - The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?

Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing t

Alice Sebold - Lucky

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.

Sara Raasch - Snow Like Ashes

No matter what happens, no matter who turns on me, no matter what pompous swine thinks he has power over me, I am still me. I will always be me.

Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human

Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is a struggle between one individual to another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. ‘Human beings never submit to human beings.’ Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and such like things, but the object of their ef

Marilyn Manson - The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

Like LaVey, I had a also discovered what happens when you say something powerful that makes people think. They become afraid of you, and they neutralize your message by giving you a label that is not open to interpretation-- as a fascist, a devil worshipper or an advocate of rape and violence.

Franklin D. Roosevelt -

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.

Ursula K. Le Guin -

He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his "cellular function." the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsib

Urusla K Le Guin -

He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his "cellular function." the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsib

J. Paul Getty - How to Be Rich

In some respects, a society in which the members reach a universal level in which they are anonymous drones by choice is even more frightening than one in which they are forced to be so against their will. When human beings relinquish their individuality and identity of their own volition, they are also relinquishing their claim to being human.

K. Hari Kumar -

Not just charity, even corruption begins at home.

Lois Lowry - A Summer to Die

Oh, sometimes it's just easier to please people," Maria said finally.

Isaac Asimov - The Caves of Steel

So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more than a C-5.

Ashly Lorenzana -

The only unique contribution you can offer the world is to be who you actually are and no one else.

Fennel Hudson - A Waterside Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 2

There’s merit in being different, inspiration in being individual, courage in being unique, and freedom in being yourself.

Fennel Hudson - A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1

People might consider you eccentric for being different, but this is good. Leaders and visionaries are not conformists afraid of standing out.

C. JoyBell C. -

I was thinking, and realised how simple my goal has been— just to be me! I didn't want to be a good person and change the world; I just wanted to be me! Against all odds, I wanted to make sure that I turned out as myself and not into my family, my society, my religion... I wanted to make sure that I turned into me! But then after that first realisation, I made a second realisation; and that is, that becoming yourself against all odds is probably the highest attainment you could ever dream of or

Nancy Arroyo Ruffin - and Identity

Do not be afraid to color outside the lines. Take risks and do not be afraid to fail. Know that when the world knocks you down, the best revenge is to get up and continue forging ahead.Do not be afraid to be different or to stand up for what's right. Never quiet your voice to make someone else feel comfortable. No one remembers the person that fits in. It's the one who stands out that people will not be able to forget.

E.E. Cummings - E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised

Anybody can learn to think, or believe, or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel... the moment you feel, you're 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.

Criss Jami - Killosophy

Everyone pretends to be 'free thinkers', but few individuals pass the line into expressive territories that may be detrimental to their own social well-being.

Friedrich Nietzsche -

Giving style” to one’s character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

Fennel Hudson - Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6

Stand up for your beliefs, and be different.

Sol Luckman - Beginner's Luke

I just want to live my own life instead of everyone else’s version of it.

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.

Andy Warhol -

You have to do stuff that average people don't understand because those are the only good things.