Quotes About Individuality

The rose that all are praising Is not the rose for me.

There is a story that one of the Seven Sages, a man named Liu Ling (ca. 221-330), habitually received guests while completely naked. His response to adverse comment was to declare, "I take the whole universe as my house and my own room as my clothing. Why, then, do you enter here into my trousers."14

so bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see man or boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can't join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for....

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

The strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.

If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of crackpot than the stigma of conformity.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.

The false self is based on two foundational pillars: one is the energy invested in the emotional programs for happiness and the other is the tendency to over-identify with the particular group from which we come or to which we belong.

I think that you've got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way.

A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.

More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

There is no simple harmony between what is good for social or personal stability, for civic commitment and attachment, and what is good for genuine freedom of the mind.

People get the biggest kick out of seeing the features of their faces plastered onto one head.

Our common preference as a species is for difference rather than unity. (Vive la différence. Vive la guerre.) Nobody designed us to be this way—it just happens to be how we blundered into the nightmare of being. Life preys on life, per Schopenhauer

The farther you progress toward a vision of our species without limiting conditions on your consciousness, the farther you drift away from what makes you a person among persons in the human community.

Creativity isn't always an index of niceness

He ceased to be a person so that he could remain a successful organism.

Once you begin to feel you are making a go of it on your own—that you are making moves and thinking thoughts which seem to have originated within you—it is not possible for you to believe you are anything but your own master.

You have two choices: Start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all.

Alone in a world full of bewildering options, human beings will prefer the reassurance of the pack and the safety of the herd rather than choose to grapple with the ambiguities and consequences of freedom.

This was the same warning José Ortega y Gasset gave when he wrote Revolt of the Masses in 1930: "The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."24 "I'm as good as you," Screwtape chortles at the end of his address, "is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image.