Quotes About Individuality

Thus, Epictetus advises us to form "a certain character and pattern" for ourselves when we are alone. Then, when we associate with other people, we should remain true to who we are.

Epictetus therefore advises us not to seek social status, since if we make it our goal to please others, we will no longer be free to please ourselves. We will, he says, have enslaved ourselves.

Liberals are not all going to say exactly the same at all times; I hope they never will, because they would cease to be Liberals.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

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

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

To generalize is to be an idiot.

O why was I born with a different face? Why was I not born like rest of my race?

Like most people of his temperament, though sociable, he (Napolean) disliked company in which he would have to appear merely as one of the crowd, even if not definitely as an inferior

To every sweetheart he (Casanova) gave himself exclusively; he had so many selves.

They lived autobiographies

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

many of the great spiritual explorers were often viewed as rebels in their time. They did not blindly follow the prevailing religious beliefs and traditions of their day. Instead, they pursued personal spiritual experience.

In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few people - three or four thousand out of millions - favoured by their own characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things, and yet "the imagination is the man himself".

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Only God, my dear,Could love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

I heard an old religious man But yesternight declare That he had found a text to prove That only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

Who shall say I am notthe happy genius of my household?

If they give you lined paper, write the other way.

My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.

All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.

Too much of me was lost in the vision of what somebody else wanted me to be.