quotations about individuality
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
CARL JUNG
The Undiscovered Self
We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.
HERMANN HESSE
Narcissus and Goldmund
The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Darkness at Noon
It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.
ERIC HOFFER
Reflections on the Human Condition
I'm an oddity of one, my strangeness too complicated to explain or share.
LIBBA BRAY
A Great and Terrible Beauty
Individuality is concrete and essential; it imports ethical being; it implies the possession of all our powers, thoughts, qualities, opinions, standards, values, so that we are determined by ourselves, not by society.
JAMES LINDSAY
"The Ethical Value of Individuality", Ethics, Volume 30
Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The American Democrat
Individuality is unaccountable surplus.
THOMAS C. HELLER
Reconstructing Individualism
Individuality is the expression of the uniqueness of every soul and the sublime manifestation of its evolution.
AVIKAL COSTANTINO
Without a Mask
The individual is the last and irreducible element of reality.
JAMES LINDSAY
"The Ethical Value of Individuality", Ethics, Volume 30
Each man must have his "I"; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
The trouble with the sacred individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
BERNARD DEVOTO
Harper's, May 1941
The white sunlight of God's truth falls through the stained glass window of the human brain and takes the color of our individuality.
FRANCES WILLARD
Address to Woman's National Council, February 22, 1891
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
DR. SEUSS
attributed, Awaken Your Magic