Quotes About Individuality

Walt Whitman was not the first to observe that we are all naked under our clothes, but he was one of the greatest, if not the first, to preach a gospel of nudity.

It comes down to this: Who am I? Am I my no-chemicals-added self, no matter how unhappy I may be? Or Should I swallow this pill, achieve tranquility and risk obliterating a certain essential part of me?

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

He is to be educated because he is a man, and not because he is to make shoes, nails, and pins.

No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.

Every human being is a volume, worthy to be studied.

Every man is a volume, if you know how to read him.

The best books for a man are not always those which the wise recommend, but often those which meet the peculiar wants, the natural thirst of his mind, and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought.

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

I really prefer books. No matter how bad a book is, it's unique, but people are all so ordinary. —I think we really like books that make us hate ourselves.

Be happy because no one is seeing what you do, no one is listening to you, no one really cares what may be achieved, but sometimes accidents happen and beauty is born.

Simplicity is never to be associated with weakness and ignorance. It means reducing tons of ore to nuggets of gold. It means the light of fullest knowledge; it means that the individual has seen the folly and the nothingness of those things that make up the sum of the life of others. He has lived down what others are blindly seeking to live up to.

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.

There is but one power to which I can yield a heart felt obedience, the decision of my own understanding, the dictate of my own conscience

They are men who have no superiors, by

As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self.

Wills aren't really strong or weak; it is the characters that they express and serve that are.

Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well . . . completely - to the edge of both my house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I am brimming in the doorways.

Because if we were each as identical as twins, I would scratch your face to say the scratch set you apart and made you more interesting, and gave you a purpose in life: to scratch me back a thousand times.

the right to be naked and not to be ruled by Mrs. Grundy deserves financial support from anyone who believes in freedom.

She is what I feel to be a good person in the word's simplest and plainest meaning. Which includes lashing out with her claws on some occasions when others may consider it improper—I don't give a damn whether Ginny is "proper" or not; I like her. I like her values.