Quotes about Individuality

Some people say religion is finding yourself, and some people say it's losing yourself in a crowd.

As you care less about what people think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves.

How you treat the one reveals how you regard the many, because everyone is ultimately a one.

We hear a lot today about identity theft. The greatest identity theft is not when someone takes your wallet or steals your credit card. The greater theft happens when we forget who we really are, when we begin to believe that our worth and identity come from how well we stack up compared to others, instead of recognizing that each of us has immeasurable worth and potential, independent of any comparison.

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life…. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

I think each of us has an internal monitor or sense, a conscience, that gives us an awareness of our own uniqueness and the singular contributions that we can make.

We decided to relax and get out of his way and let his own personality emerge.

Through deep thought and the exercise of faith and prayer, we began to see our son in terms of his own uniqueness.

Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain.

We knew that social comparison motives were out of harmony with our deeper values and could lead to conditional love and eventually to our son's lessened sense of self-worth. So we determined to focus our efforts on us—not on our techniques, but on our deepest motives and our perception of him. Instead of trying to change him, we tried to stand apart—to separate us from him—and to sense his identity, individuality, separateness, and worth.

As one successful parent said about raising children, 'Treat them all the same by treating them differently.

They want other people to be the way they want them to be. They often want to clone them, and they surround themselves with "yes" people—people who won't challenge them, people who are weaker than they.