Quotes About Individuality

Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm that possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.

My heart shall never be put under their microscope.

And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.

The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it.

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.

Indeed, as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else.

I'm really very sorry, but it is not my fault. People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets, and all my poets look exactly like pianists

I like men who have a future and women who have a past

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.

Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives everything except genius. 

I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.

Cecily is the sweetest, dearest, prettiest girl in the whole world. And I don't care twopence about social possibilities.

But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely — or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't.

To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.

To be good is to be in harmony with one's self. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.

It would be unfair to expect people to be as remarkable as oneself.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame. It will be to each man what he is himself. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets; and all my poets look exactly like pianists.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.