Quotes About Individuality

The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, even about the you children being gone, but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: 'Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.

What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place... nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.

He would get up in the midst of the crowded shop, interrupting the conversation, and start outside to relieve himself. "All who can't swim, mount the highest bench," he would cry out, "for the great he-elephant will now make water!

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes the responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill. Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Dressed up, he never looked like he was wearing his own clothes.

But there, in her diminishment, she seemed to resemble only herself, as if suffering finally had singled her out.

I suppose I was artistic as a child. Our house was so full of art and artists that it never occurred to me not to be constantly making things. I just assumed that all kids liked to work with their hands as much as I did. I was an only child so I did have a lot of time to be creative by myself and with my parents.

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.

cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety")

I am not plain, or average or - God forbid - vanilla. I am peanut butter rocky road with multicolored sprinkles, hot fudge and a cherry on top.

The trick is that as long as you know who you are and what makes you happy, it doesn't matter how others see you.

The people on the train with me don't know it, but in my head I'm dancing.

If being a girl is a frontier all its own, what is the manifest destiny?

I find all of them beautiful, the plump and the pudgy, the slim and the muscular, those who stand like solid tree trunks, the tiny ones who move like ping-pong balls, lovely, amusing, and brilliant. Although most of them are illiterate, they've always been mistresses of microeconomics with their balls and burlap and other mutual aid fundraising.

I don't think any of us are normal people.

their vulnerabilities, while different, may be profound.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my BARBARIC YAWP over the roofs of the world

Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.

She was unlike most other girls of her age, in this—that she had ideas of her own, and was stiff-necked enough to set the fashions themselves at defiance, if the fashions didn't suit her views.

She was unlike most girls of her age, in this--that she had ideas of her own.

I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I am.

see with nobody's eyes, we hear with nobody's ears, we feel with nobody's hearts, but our own.

If you will look about you (which most people won't do), says Sergeant Cuff, you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business.

you are so much better off as a single woman – unless – unless you are very fond of your husband …