Quotes About Individuality

As I am, I parrot no one; I don't venture to fly to heights at which one needs wings that I don't have. But I appreciate any crumb of knowledge that affects my feelings, which, for their part, are never at rest. I am an inferno of desires. The earth and life are never too great for my ability to feel them.

We are not interested in cloning the Michael Jordans and the Michael Jacksons of this world. The rich and the famous don't participate in this.

To accept the conventions of traditional society is to be less than an individual. To reject them is yo assume an intolerable burden of freedom in often fundamentally discouraging conditions.

Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

Çokluk nosyonu ile liberal düÅŸünce aras?nda bir ortakl?k var gibi görünür, çünkü bireyliÄŸe deÄŸer verir, ama ayn? zamanda da kendini ondan radikal bir ÅŸekilde ay?r?r, çünkü bu bireylik evrenselden, türselden, birey-öncesinden kaynaklanan bir bireyleÅŸme sürecinin nihai ürünüdür.

Be not another, if you can be yourself.

Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest. (Let no man belong to another that can belong to himself.)

I am different. Let this not upset you.

The only rule is don't be boring and dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.

Here's what I believe: Your reality is totally up for grabs; if you don't create your own life, someone else will create something based on their own agenda and project that on you. Don't let them do it, my loves. Don't let them tell you that their something is bigger than your everything.

There are so many young women who need to hear this story. I don't want them to learn from my mistakes; I want them to stop hating themselves for mistakes of their own. I want them to laugh and see that they do have a voice and their own brand of intelligence and, girl, fuck fitting in.

There is no sin worse in life than being boring—and nothing worse than letting other people tell you what to do.

The rise of selfie culture isn't about vanity; it's about women taking back control of our images—and our self-images. I don't think that's a bad thing.

becoming one's self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: `Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?"'= If you doubt that we all arrive in this world with gifts and as a gift, pay attention to an infant or a very young child. A few years ago, my daughter and her newborn baby came to live

By attaching our identity to things only a few can have, we ignore the intrinsic preciousness of all human life.

Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all.

There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else's life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and may even do great damage.

From first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take in all our clues about living from the people and powers around us.

There are as many sexes as there are individuals...the seeming neat correspondence between male and female organs is not the end, but the beginning, of sexuality.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a FISH by its ability to CLIMB a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it IS stupid

Some people's happiness is always other people's kitsch.

We are not going to confine women to the home, cover their heads, lengthen their skirts, or beat up gay people, prohibit alcohol, censure film, theater, and literature, and codify tolerance in order to respect the overly sensitive whims of a few sanctimonious persons.

Let everyone be left free not to be happy without feeling ashamed, or to be happy episodically as one sees fit. Issue no decisions, make no laws, impose nothing. If we do not want a legitimate aspiration to degenerate into a collective punishment, we must treat the pitiless idol of happiness with the most extreme disrespect.