Best 1663 quotes in «individual quotes» category

There was no one like her on the whole of the planet, no one who had ever lived or ever would. There was not a single other person with her fingerprints, with her memories, with the blood beating in her veins. She was herself, and she was alive right now, despite everything.

The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual – faith that he can be persuaded by rational means to beliefs compatible with social good.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

The secret of gestures lays mostly in mutual communication. When an individual rise to the measure of others, effectiveness is not solitary.

…the traditional family structure that More supported in her writings enabled women to 'be intelligent, rational, virtuous, and noble creatures, capable of great intellectual and moral achievements. They had the potential for immense influence on their husbands and sons, on their relations, their servants, and the poor.' More held, therefore, … 'the ideal of rational domesticity helped to liberate the individual within a supportive family framework.

The time to clean our city of any dirt begins with individual action for collective clean communities.

The unique fingerprint of every individual defines our unique purpose and mission on earth.

The uniform is that which we do not choose, that which is assigned to us; it is the certitude of the universal against the precariousness of the individual. When the values that were once so solid come under challenge and withdraw, heads bowed, he who cannot live without them (without fidelity, family, country, discipline, without love) buttons himself up in the universality of his uniform as if that uniform were the last shred of transcendence that could protect him against the cold of a future in which there will be nothing left to respect.

The spectre of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual - always an annoyance to totality - ceases to exist.

They think the only road is where they're heading, but you and I were meant to sail upon the sea.

The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality, of anti-logicality: it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross and prepares artificial limbs for the victims; towns starve and coin money out of their own hunger; spectacled school-teachers lead storm-troops; city dwellers live in caves; factory hands and other civilians crawl out on their artificial limbs once more to the making of profits. Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him. The melodramatic revulsion which characterizes this age as insane, the melodramatic enthusiasm which calls it great, are both justified by the swollen incomprehensibility and illogicality of the events that apparently make up its reality. Apparently! For insane or great are terms that can never be applied to an age, but only to an individual destiny. Our individual destinies, however, are as normal as they ever were. Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

This is the history of governments, - one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labour shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their money's worth, except for these. Hence, the less government we have, the better, - the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, - he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favourable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.

This is the age of the individual and there is no reason to believe that this focus of mankind is likely to change in the foreseeable future. Hence, the mission is to put individualism inside a wide context and to give it meaning and a sense of direction; to empower it – but authentically this time.

The website is like the person face, it says a lot of about a one individual.

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not.

Though at opposite ends of our country, Maine and Hawaii are, other than climate, much alike. Places where you say who you are, be who you are, keep your word, and don't cheat or lie to take advantage of each other. Where you protect other folks because they are your tribe.

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.

To be of value to humanity, start by thinking for yourself.

Traditionalism is not fashionable. It is the dog-crawl to fashion’s catwalk.

Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.

To forget the whole world is easy; to make the whole world forget you is hard.

Unless individuals have the power to defy commoditization and define their own lives, their potential is vulnerable to the crushing forces of objectification.

Umoja ni nguvu, utengano ni udhaifu. 2 + 2 = 5. Umoja una sisi (ubinadamu), si mimi (ubinafsi). Watu wanne wakifanya kazi kwa ushirikiano watakuwa na nguvu ya watu watano! Watakuwa na nguvu ya ziada kufanikisha malengo kama vile kuwa na uwezo wa kusaidia jamii kama timu au kama mtu binafsi, kujenga jengo la ofisi, kutengeneza ziada katika masuala ya uchumi wa kampuni au nchi au wa mtu binafsi, ushindi katika kitu chochote kile, na kadhalika. Mimi ni ubinafsi. Sisi ni ubinadamu. Ubinafsi ni uvivu. Ubinadamu ni uchapakazi.

Truth cannot be decided by the vote of the majority because truth is utterly individual and private.

Unlike the clonal longevity of asexual organisms, sexually reproduced plants and animals usually have briefer, individual life cycles. In short, the enormous diversity afforded by the evolutionary invention of sexual reproduction came with a price—death of the individual.

Value those who give you constructive criticism, because without them doing so, you will never reach the peak of what you are do.

Unless you realize yourself beyond the identity of the mind, you cannot become free from life.

Victim complex are so dangerous because they automatically attract imperious and authoritative individuals in their lives

We all have individually special kingdoms of success in each of us. Obedience is the throne of those kingdoms without which the real person we are is sure to suffer eviction.

We are parts of one universe, true enough. We stand within an almost infinite network of relationships. Yet each of us is a single point of consciousness, a unique event, a private, unrepeatable world. This is the essence of our aloneness.

We all are individual and lonely, like stars which appear so close but millions of miles apart.

We awaken by asking the right questions. We awaken when we see knowledge being spread that goes against our own personal experiences. We awaken when we see popular opinion being wrong but accepted as being right, and what is right being pushed as being wrong. We awaken by seeking answers in corners that are not popular. And we awaken by turning on the light inside when everything outside feels dark.

We cannot be of any good to other people unless we are first good to ourselves.

We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.

We're kidding ourselves if we think we can opt out of these decisions. Every policy the government adopts, and every individual choice you make, implies that a valuation has been made, even if no one has been honest enough to own up to it or even admit it to themselves.

We were built differently. Locate your own uniqueness

What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay.

When your life gets to the stage of being mindful and concerned with impacting and blessing lives, then you are pursuing wholeness as an individual.

Who will protect your rights better? A king, president or you? Who will protect the truth? A reporter, a labor union or you? Who will protect and teach your children to seek truth? A textbook committee, an education bureaucrat, or you? Did a commission of wise men stop the Holocaust? Did a committee of Congress end Jim Crow? No. In each case, the work was done by individuals who would not abide convenient lies. They saw injustice and they called it out. They saw their nation wage war against a single group and they said “not in my name.” They didn’t wait for the conventions of society to catch up to God’s laws. They pushed. They pressed. And they were victorious.

Without being an independent individual, without having an independent mind, you become nothing more than a trivial slave or an obscure shadow!

You are wonderful. You are beautiful.

You have to be a light to yourself in a world that is utterly becoming dark.

Your main target should be to find and develop your own unique individuality and not let your focus be sidetracked and drift to external things

You want a picture of the future? Imagine a boot trampling a human face.. forever. The moral to be drawn from this nightmarish situation is simple: Don't let it happen. It depends on you.

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.

Use the information you’ve been given as an individual, but NEVER let what you’ve heard or read or experienced in the past prevent you from answering the call on your life. You are responsible for your life. That includes the voice inside you and everything it calls you to do. Don’t ignore that voice to follow rules that don’t fit. When a jacket doesn’t fit anymore, it’s time to donate it. Same principle applies for rules which no longer serve you. You don’t have to curse the rules or condemn them. In fact, there might be someone else who would benefit from them at the exact moment you no longer need them. Just step into all that you can be and all that you can do.

What happens to you as an individual is you plus the world rather than you alone.

You are you. You are not a label. As an individual you have a unique place in my heart and mind.