Quotes about Individuality

It is easy in the world to live after the worlds opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

God enters by a private door into each individual.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men-that is genius.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.