Quotes About Individuality

CLOTHES SWITCH How would the story change if the characters were dressed differently—preppy, gangsta rapper-style? ETHNIC/RACE SWITCH What if the characters were given different ethnicities or races? How would that change the story? EMOTION SWITCH

There is a sense of empowerment and confidence in the act of creation that cannot be achieved by copying.

Everyone can sing. Some better than others. I fall into the 'others' category.

You know I don't like being told what to do. Then do without being told.

Though the 'Thou' is not an 'It', it is also not "another 'I'". He who treats a person as "another 'I'" does not really see that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despite the warmest "personal" feeling is really 'I'-'It'.

We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.

Our real life is not the life we live, and we feel that our deepest, nay, our most intimate thoughts are quite apart from ourselves, for we are other than our thoughts and our dreams. And it is only at special moments – it may be by merest accident – that we live our own life. Will the day ever dawn when we shall be what we are? …

Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this there can be no nobler aim in life. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other.

We do not have the right to level out all experience into a single world.

But the spectacle perceived does not partake of pure being. Taken exactly as I see it, it is a moment of my individual history, and since sensation is a reconstitution, it pre-supposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution, so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder.

There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories.

Empathy makes it that there is "the one" and not "the same.

In the last analysis each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

There is in all expression a spontaneity which will not take orders, not even those which I would like to give to myself.

Il n'est toutefois de véritable élévation que conquise, de puissance et de gloire vraies qu'individuelles, forgées par la volonté et le travail. La presse qui promet l'une et l'autre ne saurait faire tomber dans son miroir à alouettes que les médiocres et les faibles. Balzac la condamne comme une fausse école d'ambition. (p. 149)

Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?

Why become a second-rate Ravel when you're already a first-rate Gershwin?

The distinctions of fine art bore me to death.

People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a whole flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

The Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost—he becomes just an unit in unreason.

over and over, you would like to be recognized according to your own self, your own person, your own heart's inclination-but they always ask only what you have done, and really, if you look at it rationally, they have nothing else by which they can judge your state of mind except the manifestations of that state of mind.