INDIVIDUALITY QUOTES

quotations about individuality

Individuality quote

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


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?

Tags: Leo Tolstoy


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


It's hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.

DOLLY PARTON

attributed, How Dolly Parton Saved My Life


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


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

Tags: Henry David Thoreau


If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you.

VINCENT O'SULLIVAN

The Next Room


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


Taking into account the public's regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in.

JANEANE GAROFALO

Feel This Book


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

Tags: Henry Whitney Bellows


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

Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche


Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

GILLES DELEUZE

Thousand Plateaus


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

Tags: Gertrude Stein


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

Tags: Henry Miller


What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

letter to Mary Russell Mitford, January 14, 1843

Tags: Elizabeth Barrett Browning


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

Tags: Plato


Every individuality is at bottom only a special error.

GEORGE BERKELEY

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

Tags: George Berkeley


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

Tags: E. H. Chapin


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

Tags: Sabine Baring-Gould