Quotes About Individuality

Race doesn't exist. Skin color exists. Hair and eye color are real. Body type varies from individual to individual, as does tooth shape and color, the form of fingernails, and the amount and texture of body hair. But 'race' is a phantom conjured up by people no different from each other than purebred Cocker spaniels are. Race is a lie, and the people who conjure by it, no matter their color or their politics, are liars.

When I'd tell my mother about these women around me - and how sometimes I felt that I didn't measure up - she'd chastise me for getting sucked into their nonsense. 'How do you expect to get where you want to go if you're rubbernecking at everyone else along the way? Don't focus on what you wrongly perceive as your shortcomings.

You will certainly not be able to take the lead in all things yourself, for to one man a god has given deeds of war, and to another the dance, to another the lyre and song, and in another wide-sounding Zeus puts a good mind.

For rarely are sons similar to their fathers most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers.

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

There's nothing so fearsome as the revolt of a sheep," said de Marsay.

Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life, seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the midst of those domains of fancy, where the soul loves to give full rein to its wild creations.

The differences between a soldier, an artisan, a man of business, a lawyer, an idler, a student, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a beggar, a priest, are as great, though not so easy to define, as those between the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the seal, the sheep, etc. Thus social species have always existed, and will always exist, just as there are zoological species.

She was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being.

If you don't think for yourself, then you're admitting that your theory of happiness is the old dog asleep in the sun.

There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.

If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.

We pass the word around we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry we meditate over the literature we play the music we change our minds we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize in every imaginable social arrangement...We have names to label each as self, and we believe without reservation that this system of taxonomy will guarantee the entity, the absolute separateness in each of us, but the mechanism has no discernible function in the center of a crowded city; we are essentially nameless, most of our time.

You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me.

And even though I adore the fact that Francesca has Ben's eyes, I also see now that her biological connection to us is irrelevant. She is her own little person. She is Francesca. If we weren't her "natural" parents, we would still have loved her just as much.

Two musicians could play the same notes and sound entirely different. Intonation was everything.

Their uptight concerns about what other people thought seemed like such a waste. Why had they been so careful and contained with their love?

We're all on our own. Even when you're surrounded by people, or sharing a bed with a loving lover, you're alone.

Was she ever grumpy? Did she ever yell? Fall about laughing? Eat too much? Drink too much? Call out for someone to bring her toilet paper? Lose her car keys? Was she ever just a human being?

I'll never be a normal person ever again. You took that away from me. You made me ABNORMAL and it's lonely being abnormal.

There's not a damned thing wrong with your body. You are average-sized, you deluded fool! You are an attractive, intelligent woman, you idiot! You should spend January lying in a hammock and eating cheese.

Cecilia had noticed that beautiful woman held themselves differently; they swayed like palm trees in the breeze of all that attention. Cecilia wanted her daughters to run and stride and stomp. She didn't want Polly to bloody sway.

It was something to do with her sense of always feeling separate from everybody else, as if things that worried them couldn't possibly worry her, as if she were immune from the ordinariness of life.