Quotes About Individuality

We are magnets...We have keys to all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities...

Cada hombre auténtico es una causa, un país, y una era.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.

Whence is your power? From my nonconformity. I never listened to your people's law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time.

Dónde está el maestro que enseñó a Shakespeare? ¿Dónde el que enseñó a Franklin, a Washington, a Bacon, a Newton? Todo gran hombre es único.

If a person is constantly reading and absorbing the thoughts of others, their growth will be stunted. In order to fully develop, we need periods of solitude, self-inquiry, and recovery.

that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. [...] Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

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.

Y se expresaron con sus propias palabras, no con las palabras de los demás hombres

when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody;

They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in the country rather than in the town, and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude.

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everybody should follow any one path. Listen to your own truth.

To live another's dharma, to try to be a Buddha or to be a Christ because Christ did it, doesn't get us there; it just makes us mimickers

What you feel is most important may not be seen as most important to someone else. This is a very complex society we are a part of. Stay in the world, do your part, raise your children, earn your living, and assume your responsibility at every level.

I must really be crazy, now—because craziness is where everybody agrees about something,—except you!

Fashion, in Crisp's view, is the art of denying one's individuality in order to adopt the uniforms and dictates of culture, as determined by people who have never met you, and do not care whether you exist. The implicit goal is to cover your imperfections and become something you are not: a person who is acceptable in the eyes of others. A pleasing shell with no discernible interior. In Crisp's words, "Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

Style, on the other hand, is the art of bringing your defining individual features to the fore, regardless of what others might expect or find acceptable:

Knowledge and education in the hands of one who claims no higher accountability or authority than one's own individuality is power in the hands of a fool.

Are we really ever completely our own person or have we been conditioned in ways beyond our own imagination?

Accepting and celebrating the thread of your own personality is the first grasp of the Grand Weaver's design in your life. You are not a number. He knows you by name.

I believe God intervenes in the lives of every one of us. He speaks to us in different ways and at different times so that we may know he is the author of our very personality.