Quotes about Individuality

When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.

Have the courage to take your own thoughts seriously, for they will shape you.

Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.

My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle.

Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.

After all, what is an individual?

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.