Quotes About Individuality

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

A man must consider what rich realms he abdicates when he becomes a conformist

Why should the way I feel depend on the thoughts in someone else's head?

It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

It is better to be the thorn in the side of your friend than his echo

The man is only a half himself, the other half is his expression

Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.

Ser você mesmo em um mundo que está constantemente tentando fazer de você outra coisa é a maior realização.

The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.

Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men.

Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me; who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them.

We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

My life is not an apology, but a life.

La persona debería aprender a detectar y observar ese destello de luz que atraviesa su mente desde adentro, más que el realce del firmamento de los bardos y sabios. Sin embargo, la persona desecha su propio pensamiento sin tomarlo en cuenta, porque es suyo.