Quotes about Individuality

Those who seek to please everybody please nobody.

Hope not to succeed in borrowed plumes.

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.

Many people seek fellowship because they are afraid to be alone...let him who cannot be alone beware of community. He will do harm to himself and to the community. Alone you stood before God when he called you; alone you had to answer that call; alone you had to struggle and pray; and alone you will die and give an account to God. You cannot escape yourself, for God has singled you out.

The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority, and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here, is infringing eternal laws, and taking upon himself superhuman authority, which will eventually crush him.

God does not love some ideal person, but rather human beings just as we are, not some ideal world, but rather the real world.

God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me God made this person in his image. I can never know beforehand how God's image should appear in others.

The fact that he was ashamed when he was discovered praying was for Kant an argument against prayer. He failed to see that prayer by its very nature is a matter for the strictest privacy, and he failed to perceive the fundamental significance of shame for human existence.

The great mystery of our metaphysical situation, that God is nearer to us than we are ourselves, is manifest in the fact that we cannot even be wholly ourselves—in the sense of individuality as a unique divine thought—until we are reborn in Christ.

It might take just as much effort to fit in as it does to stand out, because you're standing up for yourself. It's those who take a risk and take chances who achieve greatness. Those who play it safe never can.

When someone calls another individual ugly, all I see is that the one doing the insulting becomes instantly less beautiful. Consider it a compliment to be mocked for being different.

Everyone, no matter her or his stage in life, has the right to feel beautiful.