999 Quotes About Individuality

We get swallowed up by the illusion that unless we can find a place to belong, we are going to be all alone in the world.

We are against ignorance. We feel that you have to educate yourself, no matter what the situation is. People who refuse to educate themselves - people who refuse to find out what something is about, that they're frightened of - find comfort in being ignorant.”--Zeena Schreck Interview for KJTV-1990

One can't prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person. If a man is keen on reading, I think he ought to open his mind to some older man who knows him and his life, and to take his advice in the matter, and above all, to discuss with him the first books that interest him.

I gave Henry a supscription [sic] to the Book of the Month club that tells you the book you have to read every month to make your individuality stand out. And it really is remarkable, because it makes over 50,000 people read the same book every month.

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

There is no flock of black sheep.

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.

Oh, I suppose we are all a bit crazier as kids. But I hope you never lose your sense of randomness. I hope you never lose the way you dance in the moonlight, your eyes filled with wonder. I hope you always care as much as you do today. ‘Blasé’ never looked good on anyone. And, if the world decides to be one big snob, ignore it.

Some bow to the spirit of collectivism, while you ascend to the spirit of your own eclectic rhythms.