Quotes about Individuality

Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin.

He said, "There's a sermon of John Donne's I have often had cause to remember during my lifetime. He says, Other men's crosses are not my crosses. We all have our own cross to carry, and one is all most of us are able to bear. How much do you owe him, Vicky?

It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

the climax of their journey is a showdown with IT, the cold and calculating disembodied intelligence that has cast a black shadow over the universe in its quest to make everyone behave and believe the same.

Life...is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

God go with you." "I don't believe in God." "That's all right. I do." "I'm glad.

Only a human being can say I'm sorry. Forgive me. This is part of our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears, capable of laughter.

Its good to keep wide-open ears and listen to what everybody else has to say, but when you come to make a decision, you have to weigh all of what youve heard on its own, and place it where it belongs, and come to a decision for yourself; youll never regret it. But if you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, youll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies.

You become what you think, not what others think of you.

Life is a stage: perform your masterpiece.

We are all special cases.

Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.