Quotes About Individuality

Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

It seemed an advantage to be travelling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with, we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

Wanting to sound like other people has its temptations. There are inherited habits of speech guaranteed to make us sound authoritative, intelligent, worldly, appropriately grateful, or deeply moved.

A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don't dare or know how to communicate them to others. 

There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled, or as "normal" as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for. At

There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood, or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone.

Let's make sure our ideas of success are our own, that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions.

Being alone spares you from constant reminders of how difficult and strange you are. No one is there to hold a mirror up – record your antics and constantly make you accountable for them. If you're lucky, you will be able to tolerate and even like yourself.

the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points—and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result.

I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding. 13.

If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

Melancholy isn't always a disorder that needs to be cured.

An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor.

You are allowed to be.

I will love you not just for your wit and talent and beauty, but simply because you are you, with no strings attached. I love you for who you are deep in your soul, not for the colour of your eyes or the length of your legs or the size of your cheque book.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

Moi je veux pleurer maintenant, pas après ! Je veux être le premier parce que si je pleure après les autres comment on saura que moi aussi j'ai pleuré ?

Des mots tordus, des mots décousus, des mots sans queue ni tête, j'écrirais comme les mots me viendraient, je commencerais maladroitement et je finirais maladroitement comme j'avais commencé, je m'en foutrais de la raison pure, de la méthode, de la phonétique, de la prose (...), ça serait alors l'écriture ou la vie. [Verre Cassé, p. 198]

Never at my best when at my best behaviour.

A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

In fact she knew perfectly well (Norman again), but to her everybody's name was immaterial, as indeed was everything else, their clothes, their voice, their class. She was a genuine democrat, perhaps the only one in the country.

When dead she would exist only in the memories of people. She, who had never been subject to anyone would now be on the par with everybody else. Reading could not change that. Though writing might.