Quotes About Individuality

There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I've discovered that. But this courage didn't arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.

But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's.

The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever, but you can't get that across in an essay.

and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.

In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.

When you are trained to despise "just what you like" then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others—a good slave. When you learn not to do "just what you like" then the System loves you.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well. In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.

Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.

While average finger number is an inherited trait, the heritability of finger number is low—genes don't explain individual differences much.

Watson was pathologically caught inside a bucket having to do with the environmental influences on development. "I'll guarantee . . . to train him to become any type." Yet we are not all born the same, with the same potential, regardless of how we are trained.*

there are no cookie cutters in heaven.

The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now the right-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else; and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a wide semi-circle: alone.

And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.

Jeder Mensch kommt auf die Welt mit Kräften für die unerhörtesten Erlebnisse. Die Gesetze binden ihn nicht. Aber dann lässt ihn das Leben immer zwischen zwei Möglichkeiten wählen, und immer fühlt er: eine ist nicht darunter; immer eine, die unerfundene dritte Möglichkeit. Und man tut alles, was man will, und hat nie getan, was man gewollt hat. Schließlich wird man talentlos.

jedes einzelne war hässlich, und alles zusammen war Glück.

A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings.

There's no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general cultural-medium.

If all the artists you loved changed you, they'd hack you up in little piece and you'd never get back together. That, or you'd end up loving only one artist forever.