Individuality is what distinguishes or separates one person from other persons. Individualism is reliance on the individual person or self, over social control, whether overt or covert. Paradoxically, individualism can emphasize the moral worth of every person, or the primacy of the individual in any conception of freedom, or putting one’s own moral worth above that of others.
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
The true purpose of education is to develop the individual’s highest potentialities and to prepare them for a life of service to humanity.
There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe…
At every crossing of the threads there is an individual.
And every individual is a crystal bead.
And every crystal bead reflects
Not only the light from every other crystal in the net
But also every other reflection
Throughout the entire universe.
The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.
It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.
If you cannot be faithful to your own individuality, then you cannot be loyal to anything.
If one is not faithful to their own individuality, then they cannot by loyal to anything.
No abundance of material goods can compensate for the death of individuality and personal creativity.
Sometimes, I am also identified as a civil rights leader or a human rights activist. I would also like to be thought of as a complex, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being with a rich storehouse of experiences, much like everyone else, yet unique in my own way, much like everyone else.
It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.
I was motivated to be different in part, because I was different.
Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.
The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
Values are like fingerprints. Nobody’s are the same, but you leave ’em all over everything you do.
There is a new habit which ought to be supported by a practical philosophy of ethics. How to prize the distinctive difference of each individual. How to prize uniqueness. Not the conventional sameness of people. Not uniformity. But individuality. The ethical quality is that in which a person expresses uniqueness. The ethical act is the most individualized act.
We shall grow in the attempt to help others to grow. Every human being is valuable…. Neither individualism, nor altruism is the satisfying life. People grow and develop in proportion as they help others grow and develop…. The attempt to actualize the potential in others, unfolds resources dormant in ourselves. This dedication to self and others harmonizes the ever conflicting claims of individualism and altruism. The good of oneself, and the good of others, emerge together.
The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by. The saint is the man who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light.
Every one looks upon the world from a different angle. Every person becomes individualized through dealing with life. In the workshop of daily living the soul is born. The daily tasks is the anvil on which one must beat out one’s selfhood.
Some people say each person has a soul. I would say each person comes into the world with the possibility of a soul. The aim of life is to change our potential soul into an actuality. The whole purpose of life is to become an individual; to become a personality; to acquire distinct selfhood.
One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.
You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own.
Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood, for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child’s soul.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
The way you get to know yourself is by the expression on other people’s faces.
There is in every American, I think, something of the old Daniel Boone — who, when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too crowded and moved further out into the wilderness.
Be yourself. The world loves the original.
It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.
We don’t have to surrender our individuality to experience the world as an extended self and its story as our own extended story. The liver, leg, and lung that are ‘mine’ are highly distinct from each other, thank goodness, and each has a distinctive role to play. The larger ‘selfness’ we discover today is not an undifferentiated unity. As in all living systems, intelligence depends on the integrative play of diversity. Diversity is a source of resilience. This is good news because this time of great challenge demands more commitment, endurance, and courage than any one of us can dredge up out of our own individual supply. We can learn to draw on the other neurons in the neural net and view them with gratitude. The acts and intentions of others are like seeds that can germinate and bear fruit through our own lives, as we take them in and dedicate that awareness to the healing of our world.
