Quotes About Individuality

I wonder where in the world it would be possible to have the ideal, a middle way, a balance between individuality and responsibility to the larger community. Easily named, of course, but I cannot begin to imagine where to achieve it.

Yet in a country with one hundred types of toothpaste on supermarket shelves, schools still follow a one-size-fits-all educational model.

Children march in lockstep through grades with their age peers, regardless of their capabilities.

What did classes matter when she knew everything taught in them? Not learning made her miserable. She decided that she was the crazy one, that she was too different. It was better to stop trying. She started getting C's on her report cards.

As part of it, some teachers created a behavioral checklist for her in tenth grade. It was a prescription for how to fit in: Don't talk so much in class; keep it to a sound bite. Don't be so aggressive. Don't answer all the questions. Don't discuss things so much. Tone it down. Don't challenge the classroom status quo.

There it was, written down for her to follow: how to take that precocious mind and learn to be like everyone else.

Do not be a follower, because others like it, but be different want You like it. Jan Jansen

In a world where one can be anything, sometimes the hardest thing to be is yourself.

nobody really knows how anybody else feels - you may think you are feeling as a woman, or as a man, but you may simply be feeling as yourself.

It hit me that being hip was a full-time job, and I was only a part-timer. I couldn't hide forever that I liked county fairs, particularly the goat booth at the 4-H tent, or that I once spent a week with my grandmother at her house in the giant retirement community of Sun City, Arizona, and it was one of the most carefree times of my life.

I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.

One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.

I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.

Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

And pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.

I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like

You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them.

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

but then I am unlike other people I dare say.

One man's style must not be the rule of another's.

I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.

My style of writing is very different from yours.

Catherine hoped at least to pass uncensured through the crowd. As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it came, but she did not depend on it.

I am tired of submitting my will to the caprices of others—of resigning my own judgement in deference to those to whom I owe no duty, and for whom I feel no respect.