Quotes About Individuality

I am not a donkey to be led by the carrot of salvation and the stick of damnation without thinking of where they are driving me and what they are making me do.

1. Thou shalt not force thy neighbor to alter his consciousness. 2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his consciousness.

I passed on to the kitchen, as if Bill were not a major item of interest at the moment. That was step one; everybody, I was sure, had been treating his symptoms as a grave problem, and I wanted to give him back his sense of perspective. There were nearly three billion people on earth who didn't know and didn't care about his mental states and I was standing in for all of them.

Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, spaceless software, we would have no individuality, no center, no Self.

Concretely, two people can be in the same existential situation but experience two very, very different reality-tunnels.

Every person lives in a different umwelt (emic reality) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel.

It seems to me that existence — at this point I have doubts about the universe — is a lot like a Rorschach ink-blot. Everybody looks at it and sees their own favorite reality-tunnel.

Around the world today are millions living in the Marxist reality-tunnel, the vegetarian reality-tunnel, the Buddhist reality-tunnel, the nudist reality-tunnel, the monetarist reality-tunnel, the Methodist reality-tunnel, the Zionist reality-tunnel, the Polynesian totemistic reality-tunnel etc.

I suddenly remembered that Adolph Hitler once said that anybody who paints the sky green should be sterilized at once. I thought I understood the Right Man more deeply. The Right Man stays in one reality-tunnel because wandering into the reality-labyrinth of the creative mind terrifies him.

How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?

5. James Joyce said he never met a boring human being. Try to explain this. Try to get into the Joycean head space, where everybody is a separate reality-island full of mystery and surprise. In other words, learn to observe.

The dark inner circle would represent the adamantine individuality of this ideally detached person — detached from robot imprints. The grey circle would represent the ability to move out into each quadrant in times when that was necessary.

As Thomas Szasz, M.D., points out in The Myth of Mental Illness, many people in our society develop neurotic symptoms or psychosomatic illnesses because the only way to become important in Christian culture is to be conspicuously more pitiful than others.

Everybody you meet is an "artist" who has made a similar creation.

The peoples of the earth are islands," said the late Clement Atlee, "shouting at each other over oceans of misunderstanding." Each island is a separate reality-tunnel created by (a) our culture, (b) our sub-culture and (c) by the myth-maker or artist in each of us who is the adamantine individuality that makes you and me unique human selves, not replicable units like the ants in a hive.

The point is not to get hung up on being what you're supposed to be. If you can, it's good to do what pleases you.

I took some time to evaluate them, and concluded that fashionable dress was heavily dependent on who was wearing it. I

Analogy," Susan said. "Hawk's world is not like anyone else's." I nodded. "So asking Hawk about Thanksgiving is like asking a fish about a bicycle," Susan said.

What I must do concerns me, not what people think.' 

He had on a red sleeveless jumpsuit, black shirt with bell sleeves, high-heeled black patent leather boots with black laces. A full-length black leather trench coat hung open.

O'Mara sat back down and crossed his legs effortlessly. His freshly creased slacks were the color of butterscotch. His wing-tipped loafers were burgundy. He wore no socks. He had on a starched white shirt, open at the throat, and a blue blazer with brass buttons. My clothes must never fit that well, I thought. I'd be overwhelmed with sexual opportunities, and never get any work done. I promised myself to be careful.

He who would be a man must be a nonconformist.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not.

It is the fate of the genius to dwell alone.