Quotes About Individuality

I have always been taught to be proud of being Latina, proud of being Mexican, and I was. I was probably more proud of being a label than of being a human being, that's the way most of us were taught. Since the day we enter this world we were a label, a number, a statistic, that's just the way it is. Now if you ask me what race I am, like Zlata, I'll simply say, I'm a human being.

That's exactly what we all are. We spend so much time trying to figure out what race a person is when we could just get to know them as individuals. I felt like answering their question with a question. Does it matter? Will it make a difference if she is Croatian, Muslim, Serbian?

I couldn't please everyone, there was no way to do that. But I could please myself. That was my conclusion, and I knew what pleased me. Having the freedom to make my own mistakes, to learn, to grow, to become a better person. Being here, in this house, with this guy, pleased me. My friendships pleased me. My hoodie made me happy. It was all the simplest things that mattered, and the future didn't have to be decided tonight.

Just me, rocking the awk.

What I'm trying to get you to understand is that I get it that you think of women as fitting into two categories--whores and the Madonna. But I'm neither. I'm just Jessica, somewhere in between, and I love you and want you to accept me.

I don't want to see people as other people see them, I want to see them as I see them.

Within reasonable limits, we gals all look alike nowadays, except for details.

I'm perfectly capable of living my own life. If I get into something, I want to get out of it through my own efforts. If I can't, I want to stay there. I don't want to have Hal Anders rushing into the city to lift me up out of the gutter, brush the mud off my clothes, smile sweetly down at me, and say, 'Won't you come home now, Mae, marry me, settle down, and live happily ever after?

the words of young Ted Kennedy, Jr., who lost his leg to cancer. People are taught we should look perfect, he said. I wondered who would ever go out with a kid with one leg.

A child develops individuality long before he develops taste. I have seen my kid straggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.

Before you try to keep up wiht the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

The healthy person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the real man, is the one who has transcended himself.

The person has to learn to derive his self-esteem more from within himself and less from the opinions of others; he has to try to base it on real qualities and capacities, things he can make or do

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence

This is how we understand depressive psychosis today: as a bogging down in the demands of others—family, job, the narrow horizon of daily duties. In such a bogging down the individual does not feel or see that he has alternatives, cannot imagine any choices or alternate ways of life, cannot release himself from the network of obligations even though these obligations no longer give him a sense of self-esteem, of primary value, of being a heroic contributor to world life even

Very few of us ever find our authentic talent—usually it is found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society rewards us for.

The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

everybody has to think and see for himself, or the nations are doomed.

every human being is… equally unfree, that is, we… create out of freedom, a prison….

flexibility of the self was the achievement of a rare maturity

He can even give his body over to the tribe, the state, the embracing magical umbrella of the elders and their symbols; that way it will no longer be a dangerous negation for him. But there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit—what we call the "mature" character.

We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves.

Be like father, but don't do like father

He has to try to get as many ways of earning self-esteem as possible, to constantly broaden his skills, the things he genuinely takes pleasure in, in place of what others think he should take pleasure in.