Quotes About Individuality

you just can't use averages to predict the specifics of the next generation of eddies, any more than you could use an average to predict the life-story of an individual human being.

If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.

To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.

So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

Primeiro grande dispositivo a produzir social e regularmente a personalidade aparente, a moda estetizou e individualizou a vaidade humana, conseguiu fazer do superficial um instrumento de salvação, uma finalidade de existência.

I guess I would say: above anything else, stay true to yourself. Whether that means for you that you like to have blue hair, or you don't like to drink, or you are attracted to the same sex, or you want to remove yourself from Facebook, or you've got 3 different kids from 3 different dads but you know you're a really good mom, or you cry for a week because your turtle died. Whatever your truth is, stay true to yourself. But be a good person while you're at it.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

She's easy to like. I've never understood why that's considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.

I just think some women aren't made to be mothers. And some women aren't made to be daughters.

A stark sense of isolation encloses anyone who looks outward for validation.

Our beliefs define us. And who wants to be undefined in today's world? So we scrape together convenient truths and build our identities out of them.

After a certain age, you finally become the indisputable authority on the subject of yourself.

We don't want to settle down anymore; we've been settled, like some western township, and now we want to kick up the dust and tear down the fences. Not only won't we settle down; we also won't settle for less than what we've always wanted: a good time and a fair fight.

One year from now, a decade, a century, half a millennium, will things be different? Dare we dream it? When we are seen for ourselves, not just as the conduit of progeny, heirs, lineage, not just as beautiful objects to be protected, inspected, appreciated, but for who we are at the core . . .

What happens when self-erasure has been the norm for so long that the You cannot find its way back to I?

And: there are so many paths we could have traveled—so many other people we could have been. Staying would not have rendered me weak—an inconsequential June Cleaver—just as cheating didn't make me a coldhearted monster. The clean reduction of a woman to any prime number is always a lie, even if some lies are prettier than others.

Maybe that, then, is the definition of freedom: to be neither protected by nor tethered to a man who can fix anything.

you no longer expect to stop pretending someday. It has become simply a part of who you are,

Treasure yourself for being, not doing.

If you are feeling constrained by a group that you belong to, ask yourself, "How can I participate in this community and still be who I am?

Be who you are. You may not always please but you will never go wrong.

In these pages, traveling "solo" does not necessarily mean "alone." The absence of other people often suggests regretful isolation. "Solo" by contrast, is a willful decision to be the architect of our own experience.

Experiment with grounding yourself with who you are, not what you do.

Body follows mind. If the mind compares itself to others this could lead to overtraining. Tune out what other runners do and how fast they run. Tune in, instead, to how your body wants to increase speed and distance.