Quotes about Individuality

Books are not men—

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.

the grace of what makes him different, is what enables him to "stand up.

So the verse means, "Do not let the age in which you live force you into its scheme of thinking and behaving."

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them." "Yes," said Harriet, "but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel." "I don't think that matters, provided one doesn't try to persuade one's self into appropriate feelings.

so interesting and a really remarkable face, though perhaps not strictly good-looking, and all the more interesting for that, because good-looking people are so often cows.

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!

What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him-but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.

As we cannot afford to squander our natural resources of minerals, food, and beauty, so we cannot afford to discard any human resources of brains, skills, and initiative, even though it is women who possess them...a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual.

Every man should be content to mind his own business.

Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency.