Quotes about Individuality

Other people can't make you see with their eyes. At the best they can only encourage you to use your own.

That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability.

That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson.

It is human variability -- the fact that one man's meat is is another man's poison -- that imposes on us the duty of preserving individual liberty and of encouraging tolerance, of preventing majorities from repressing minorities, of permitting people to have a certain measure of self-determination in their lives.

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely. They're beastly to one.

At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized London he was suffering because he could not escape from those communal activities, never be quietly alone.

Having the freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.

A human being in a highly technicized productive unit is simply not allowed to be spontaneous. It just interferes with the plan laid down in advance by the engineers and technicians who decide how he should word, and in this way he, the human being, is profoundly diminished, because he is not permitted to be spontaneous.

Every individual being, from the atom up to the most highly organized of living bodies and the most exalted of finite minds, may be thought of [...] as a point where a ray of the primordial Godhead meets one of the differentiated, creaturely emanations of that same Godhead's creative energy.

That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books. If one is different, one is bound to be lonely. Beauty is attractive and we don't want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.

Don't call us saints, we don't want to be dismissed that easily.

The Sneetches got really quite smart on that day. The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches. And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches. That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whether they had one, or not, upon thars.