Quotes About Individuality

It was the way of Emma Lou always to create her worlds within her own mind without taking under consideration the fact that other people and other elements, not contained within herself, would also have to aid in their molding.

Poetry is not about authority. Poetry is one of the few thing we all have access to all the time that transcends and transforms authority into freedom.

When, for instance, we meet a man, we do not look on him as a human being, but we put a label on him, such as English, French, German, American, or Jew, and regard him with all the prejudices associated with that label in our mind. Yet he may be completely free from those attributes which we have put on him.

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.

In this dark, when we all talk at once, some of us must learn to whistle.

"I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass."

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,No more modest than immodest.Unscrew the locks from the doors!Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person,Yet utter the word Democratic, the wordEn-Masse.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.I loafe and invite my soul,I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious.

Books are not men—

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.

Do I contradict myself Very well then I contradict myself,

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am, Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me, I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. Writing and talk do not prove me, I carry the plenum of proof in my face, With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.

Reexamine all that you have been told in school, or in church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your soul.

As the world gathers momentum toward nihilation on all fronts --- we walk apart, each to his own lonely end . . . not hand in hand as lovers walk.

Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.

As long as I live I shall always be My Self - and no other, Just me.

The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.

Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.