Quotations on Individuality

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.

~ William James

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

~ Aristotle

The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual.

~ Walt Whitman

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.

~ John Stuart Mill

That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

~ John Stuart Mill

But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences.

~ John Stuart Mill

Resolve to be thyself and know that he who finds himself loves his misery.

~ Matthew Arnold