Quotes About Individuality

But if you're just a stranger to everybody on earth, then that's what you are and there's no end to it. You don't know the words to say.

It was about being able to dance like Cassidy did, as though no one was watching, as though the moment was infinite enough without needing to document its existence.

Being like everybody is the same as being nobody.

According to the Buddhist tradition," he began, "there is no sort of conversion or missionary work. It is not good to ask someone to follow a different faith. Yet, because there are so many different mental dispositions, one religion simply cannot serve, cannot satisfy all people.

I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for awhile, and that's the truth, the whole truth. The unvanquished truth, is how Freak would say it, and for a long time it was him who did the talking.

The other Bonds were not wrong in the role (even Lazenby has his defenders), but they were not Connery, and that was their cross to bear.

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

All happy endings are the same, but every unhappy ending is unhappy in its own way.

Orgasmic realizations will always be frowned upon by those who feel they have to keep up appearances.

Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. We become freely choosing individuals only by acquiring obligations to parents, siblings, institutions and groups: obligations that we did not choose.

Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person's taste be used to cast judgement on another's? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgements merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them?

The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.

People discovered, in their personal lives, that civil society is not goal-directed. It comes into being, in whatever circumstances, as an end in itself, a form of life that is appreciated for what it is, not for what it does.

Liberté has been bureaucratised in the sense that it doesn't any more represent the freedom of people to break out, to do the thing that they really want to do. Rather it's conceived as a form of empowerment – the state gives you this in the form of vouchers or privileges, privileges, for example, that you might have as a gay, or a woman, or an ethnic minority.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is doing very much thinking.

You are a deviant from the social norm! Is that an insult or a diagnosis?

No two authors can render the same story in the same fashion.

All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.

Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).

Valéry used to speak of those people who die in an accident because they are unwilling to let go of their umbrellas; how many subjects repressed, refracted, blinded as to their true sexuality, because they are unwilling to let go of a stereotype.

It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.

Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither *he* nor *she* The other has only a name of his own, and her own name. The third person pronoun is a wicked pronoun; it is a pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls.