Quotes About Individuality

The word personality comes from the Latin persona, which means "mask." In the public we all wear masks, and this has a positive function.

There Are No Superior Callings

Les gens jugent tout à l'apparence ; ce qui n'est pas visible ne compte pour rien. Ne vous laissez jamais noyer dans la foule ni sombrer dans l'oubli. Soyez à tout prix le point de mire, celui que l'on remarque. Faites-vous plus grand, plus chatoyant, plus mystérieux que la masse terne et morne, soyez l'aimant qui attire tous les regards.

In any event, you will want to go as far as you can in cultivating your uniqueness and the originality that goes with it. In a world full of people who seem largely interchangeable, you cannot be replaced.

People are more complicated than the masks they wear in society

You are one of a kind. Your combination of skills and experience is not replicable. That represents true freedom and the ultimate power we humans can possess.

Understand this: The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed.

Anyone who would spend years absorbing the techniques of their field, trying them out, mastering them, exploring and personalizing them, would inevitebly find their authentic voice and give birth to something unique and expressive

Daily Law: Embrace your strangeness. Identify what makes you different. Fuse those things together and become an anomaly. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling—The Life's Task

Você é único, e sua singularidade tem um propósito. É preciso encarar todo retrocesso, fracasso ou dificuldade como provações ao longo do caminho, como sementes plantadas para a colheita futura.

See into the Spirit of the Times A man's shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Daily Law: With some distance and awareness, you can become much more than a follower of or a rebel against your generation; you can mold your own relationship to the zeitgeist and become a formidable trendsetter.

Leonardo ansiaba aprender todas esas habilidades, pero pronto descubrió algo en sí mismo: no podía hacer sencillamente lo que se le encargara; debía convertirlo en algo propio, inventar en vez de imitar al maestro.

everyone lives in a world of his own. The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly on the way in which he looks at it

that we are far more mysterious, complex, and interesting than we had imagined.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. —Eric Hoffer

This is a lesson that the stars in the sky teach us—they may be related to the sun, and just as brilliant, but they never appear in her company. (Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)

About the only thing that constant human contact cannot facilitate is thought. The weight of society's pressure to conform, and the lack of distance from other people, can make it impossible to think clearly about what is going on around you.

My policy is to have no policy. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1809–1865

Create Mental Space from the Group

Daily Law: Be brutally honest with yourself, aware of how your need to fit in can shape and warp your thinking. Does that anxiety or sense of outrage that we feel come completely from within, or is it inspired by the group?

The Laws of Human Nature, 14: Resist the Downward Pull of the Group—The Law of Conformity

To resist this downward pull that groups inevitably exert on us, we must conduct a kind of experiment in human nature with a simple goal in mind—to develop the ability to detach ourselves from the group and create some mental space for true independent thinking.

Nuestra época puede enfatizar la igualdad, que luego confundimos con la necesidad de que todos seamos idénticos, pero su verdadero significado es la igualdad de oportunidades para expresar nuestras diferencias