#individual

Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It’s the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. ‘We are too ego-centered,’ Suzuki tells Cage.’ The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away. ↗

— Kay Larson

#individual #life #mind #self #suffering

On some such night as this she remembered promising to herself to live as brave and noble a life as any heroine she ever read or heard of in romance, a life sans peur et sans reproche; it had seemed to her then that she had only to will, and such a life would be accomplished. And now she had learnt that not only to will, but also to pray, was a necessary condition in the truly heroic. Trusting to herself, she had fallen. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#heroic #individual-will #noble #prayer #strength

The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide‟s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the Page | 49 . state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian‟s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#law #life #society #society-individualism #suicide

To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence. ↗

— Frank Herbert

#humanity #individuality #life #life

I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#individuals #love #mankind #love

There's a rebel lying deep in my soul. Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go the opposite direction. I hate the idea of trends. I hate imitation; I have a reverence for individuality. ↗

— Clint Eastwood

#rebels #self-determination #trends #love

Peace between countries must rest on the solid foundation of love between individuals. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#individuals #love #peace #love

Nationality was the most pernicious, depersonalizing, homogenizing label that could ever be attached to the human individual. ↗

— Rolf Hochhuth

#love

Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it. ↗

— Tallulah Bankhead

#southern #trouble

I don't fit into any stereotypes. And I like myself that way. ↗