Quotes About Individuality

To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information with. With our own eyes we see, and with our skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself. SOPHY BURNHAM

Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others. Their lives have obscured and detoured our own. As we consolidate a core through our withdrawal process, we become more able to articulate our own boundaries, dreams, and authentic goals. Our personal flexibility increases while our malleability to the whims of others decreases. We experience a heightened sense of autonomy and possibility.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

each of us is our own country, an interesting place to visit. It is the accurate mapping out of our own creative interests that invites the term original. We are the origin of our art, its homeland. Viewed this way, originality is the process of remaining true to ourselves.

To be truly human, we all have the right to make art. We all have the right to write.

Be careful to safeguard your newly recovering artist. Often, creativity is blocked by our falling in with other people's plans for us. We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn't. It makes us frustrated people.

Writing, as we are taught to do it, becomes an antihuman activity. We are forever editing, leaving out the details that might not be pertinent. We are trained to self-doubt, to self-scrutiny in the place of self-expression.

When well-meaning parents and friends push marriage or nine-to-five or anything on us that doesn't evolve in a way that allows for our art to continue, we will react as if we are fighting for our lives—we are.

Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others.

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples' models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open. SHAKTI GAWAIN

Be particularly alert to any suggestion that you have become selfish or different.

Be particularly alert to any suggestion that you have become selfish or different. (These are red-alert words for us. They are attempts to leverage us back into our old ways for the sake of someone else's comfort, not our own.)

For me, writing is like a good pair of pajamas -- comfortable. In our culture, writing is more often costumed up in a military outfit. We want our sentences to march in neat little rows, like well-behaved boarding-school children.

La pintura es un intento de asumir la vida. Existen tantas soluciones como seres humanos». GEORGE TOOKER

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness. SHAKTI GAWAIN

Cómo iban a poder si su propio hábito de beber es algo a lo que quieren aferrarse? «Saber lo que prefieres, en lugar de decir sumisamente "amén" a lo que el mundo te dice que debieras preferir, significa que has mantenido tu alma con vida».

To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information with. With our own eyes we see, and with our skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.

Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción

It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.

No one belongs to us, and we belong to no one - not in that sense. This should free us, but it never quite does.

Mother," Hyacinth said, pausing for slightly longer than normal to steal a bit of time to organize her thoughts, "I am not going to chase after Mr. St. Clair. He's not at all the right sort of man for me." "I'm not certain you'd know the right sort of man for you if he arrived on our doorstep riding an elephant." "I would think the elephant would be a fairly good indication that I ought to look elsewhere.

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?

I've always thought you are what you are and you shouldn't pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you're pretending to be.