Quotes About Individuality

I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers... It is an invitation to think -- not to believe.

But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

If I choose to dine with publicans and sinners, that is my business. But I do not choose to break bread with Pharisees.

Just a man, with a face-shaped face

You don't own a cat, he is a free citizen. Take

Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.

But, do you know, once you get used to it, it's rather cute. I mean, if a girl looks all right to start with, she still looks all right with her head smooth.

I say 'art' advisedly, for art is undefined, undefinable, and without limits. I can use the word without fear of misusing it, for it has no exact meaning. There are as many meanings as there are artists.

and when you're home, what's wrong with skin? Or as near as local custom permits.

All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts; those who know this and those who do not.

A man isn't a collection of chemical reactions, he is a collection of ideas.

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.

Decentralization, dear

I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal…but a man.

My little Marochka speaks the truth of her heart, as she must. As must every Rasputin. And indeed as must every person.

Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structural common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read: and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself.

The human figures in the large biblical landscape act as free agents out of the impulses of a memorable and often fiercely assertive individuality, but the actions they perform all ultimately fall into the symmetries and recurrences of God's comprehensive design. Chapter 5 - The Techniques of Repetition

Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after another. After the 6th candy bar a man on the bench across from him said Son you know eating all that candy isn't good for you. It will give you acne rot your teeth and make you fat. Little Tony replied My grandfather lived to be 107 years old. The man asked Did you grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time Little Tony answered No he minded his own fucking business.

Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.

I can summarize my thoughts now by simply saying each must find his or her own Way because the way does not exist.

I would hate to be taken seriously. Serious people are always so grim and uptight that they make me want to dance naked on the lawn playing a flute.

If I am so fortunate as to be listening to the Hammerklavier sonata, the only correct answer, if you ask me suddenly, Who are you? would be to hum the Hammerklavier.

The parallels with my own experience are numerous – but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.