#individuality

You have to do stuff that average people don't understand because those are the only good things. ↗

— Andy Warhol

#individuality #originality #warhol #individuality

Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg. ↗

— Paul Collins

#individuality #hard-work

There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. And a person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse. It is easy for any one to imagine an ideal public, which leaves the freedom and choice of individuals in all uncertain matters undisturbed, and only requires them to abstain from modes of conduct which universal experience has condemned. But where has there been seen a public which set any such limit to its censorship? or when does the public trouble itself about universal experience. In its interferences with personal conduct it is seldom thinking of anything but the enormity of acting or feeling differently from itself; and this standard of judgment, thinly disguised, is held up to mankind as the dictate of religion and philosophy, by nine tenths of all moralists and speculative writers. These teach that things are right because they are right; because we feel them to be so. They tell us to search in our own minds and hearts for laws of conduct binding on ourselves and on all others. What can the poor public do but apply these instructions, and make their own personal feelings of good and evil, if they are tolerably unanimous in them, obligatory on all the world? ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#freedom #individuality #morality #philosophy #experience

Its hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world. ↗

— Dolly Parton

#excellence #greatness #individuality #individuality

People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis. ↗

— Mary MacLane

#individuality #mac

If a man does not keep pace with his companion, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#individuality #conformity

Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again. ↗

— Criss Jami

#cool #coolness #fool #independence #individuality

But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#conformity #declaration-of-independence #hope #individuality #non-conformity

We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#classification #individuality #stereotypes #stereotypes

The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality. ↗

— Erich Auerbach

#course #differentiated #full #how #individual