Quotes about Individuality

I'd love to be the female Kanye. I think he's so cool and effortless.

Contrary to the assumptions of Western moral traditions, human beings are (1) not free in their actions but governed by necessity; (2) not transparent to themselves and others in their motivations, but opaque; (3) not similar to each other and therefore subject to the same moral code, but each different.

success is not a comparison of what we have done with what others have done.

Even if two people have a baby together, they are still separate. Each of us remains in isolation. It's not by living together, or by having sexual relations, or even by having children together that we can dispel this feeling of isolation. We can only dispel our mutual isolation when we practice mindfulness and are able to truly come home to ourselves and each other.

What we have to be is what we are.

Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.

If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100)

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them

A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary.