Quotes About Individuality

A man can't soar too high, when he flies with his own wings.

Make your own rules or be a slave to another man's.

Oh! why was I born with a different face? why was I not born like the rest of my race? when I look,each one starts! when I speak, I offend; then Im silent & passive & lose every friend. Then my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise, my person degrade & my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; all my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. Im either too low or too highly prized; when elate I m envy'd, when meek Im despis'd

The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.

To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The difference between a good artist and a bad one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal, the good one really does.

The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.

We all see the world differently from each other; we all have unique vision.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! — William Carlos Williams, from "Danse Russe," The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939 , edited by Christopher MacGowan.

I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! from "Danse Russe

One no more owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to an echo

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

I can stand on my own feet; I don't need any man's mahogany desk to prop me up

All right. It is so, then. But not to me. Not in my life and my love.

It was that his words, his telling, just did not synchronize with what his hearers believed would (and must) be the scope of a single individual.

Luster returned, wearing a stiff new straw hat with a colored band and carrying a cloth cap. The hat seemed to isolate Luster's skull, in the beholder's eye as a spotlight would, in all its individual planes and angles. So peculiarly individual was its shape that at first glance the hat appeared to be on the head of someone standing immediately behind Luster.

I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.

I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.

This world is not his world; this life his life.

La mejor manera de considerar a las personas, negras o blancas, es considerarlas tal y como ellas creen que son, y luego dejarlas en paz. Fue entonces cuando me di cuenta de que un negro no es tanto una persona como un modo de ser; una especie de reflejo invertido de los blancos entre los que vive.