quotations about individuality
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Self-Reliance and Other Essays
But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency of personal impulses and preferences.
JOHN STUART MILL
On Liberty
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no universal recipe for living. Each of us carries his own life-form within him--an irrational form which no other can outbid.
CARL JUNG
The Practice of Psychotherapy
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
As to the distinguishing of individuality and individualism, it is important but no less easy, for they are very different--indeed, opposites. Both may meen a fact or a doctrine. Individuality as fact, lies in a character of marked difference from others, a mind not molded to a pattern or hewn to a shape. As a doctrine, individuality is the principle that diversity of character in unity of cooperation is right and natural. Individualism is the direct opposite of individuality, as I have said; as a fact, it is withdrawel from association into independent action, and ipso facto is is similarity or level likeness of character; for it is certain that as men drift away from each other by disassociation of functions, they must drift into a generic level of likeness, like the brutes. As a doctrine, individualism is the assertion that this sameness of nature with uncooperative separation is the right and natural way.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
"Of Individuality", Essays
I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
The common individual always conforms to the prevailing opinion and the prevailing fashion; he regards the state in which everything now exists as the only possible one and passively accepts it all.... To the genius it always occurs to ask: Could this too not be false?
GEORG LICHTENBERG
The Waste Books
It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.
MIGUEL SYJUCO
Ilustrado
Individuality is a step in advance of Genius. Genius constructs; Individuality creates. Genius makes; Individuality moulds.... Genius is a splendid device; Individuality is a divine voice.... Genius is a beacon light; Individuality is the sun burning in its might.
JAMES LOGAN GORDON
I, Myself
More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.
ALBERT CAMUS
Notebooks 1935-1942
The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even -- if you will -- eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.
JOSEPH BRODSKY
Less Than One: Selected Essays
The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Ideas and Opinions
Individuality is neither a quality nor a category; it is a mode of being. To characterize a thing as an individual is to point to its participation in a singular relation to what it is not. And it is to this relation that we must attend if we are to develop a philosophical language which can adequately articulate the force and significance of the individual in general experience. While it evolves out of resistance and denial, this relation must nevertheless be characterized by a certain reciprocity inasmuch as it is always dyadic. That is, when we say that something is individual, we point to a way in which it stands apart from that which is not, but at the same time seem to draw it into relation with whatever is external to it.
BRIAN JOHN MARTINE
Individuals and Individuality
In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I".
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Individuality is that which you bring into the world.
OSHO
The Book of Wisdom
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.
SARAH VOWELL
Take the Cannoli
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free. Constraint is always present in society, like a companion of whom there is no riddance; and in proportion to the greatness of a man's individuality, it will be hard for him to bear the sacrifices which all intercourse with others demands.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Counsels and Maxims
Life is not a monotone but a many-stringed harmony, and to this harmony is contributed a distinctive note by each individual.
ANNIE BESANT
The Birth of New India
The measure of individuality is the depth and breadth of true relation. I am an individual not as far as I am apart from, but as far as I am a part of other men.
PAULINE GRAHAM
Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.
JOHN STUART MILL
On Liberty and Other Essays