Individual Quotes

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We have to make truth and non-violence not matters for mere individual practice but for practice by groups and communities and nations. That at any rate is my dream. I shall live and die in trying to realize it. My faith helps me to discover new truths every day.

It seems to me that the simple acceptance of this fundamental fact of American life, this acknowledgment that the law of work is the fundamental law of our being, will help us to start aright in facing not a few of the problems that confront us from without and from within. As regards internal affairs, it should teach us the prime need of remembering that, after all has been said and done, the chief factor in any man's success or failure must be his own character—that is, the sum of his common sense, his courage, his virile energy and capacity. Nothing can take the place of this individual factor.

Theodore Roosevelt

An individual, thinking himself injured, makes more noise than a State.

Thomas Jefferson

To me it seems that to give happiness is a far nobler goal that to attain it: and that what we exist for is much more a matter of relations to others than a matter of individual progress: much more a matter of helping others to heaven than of getting there ourselves.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.

They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself

The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.

My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence.... In a gentle way you can shake the world.

I don't suppose there's a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There's youth to the amount of eight hundredpound a-year, at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I'd take sixteen hundred pound worth, if I could get 'em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among 'em as nothing should equal it!

Charles Dickens

We do not benefit from a relationship with China or any other country in which we put our values and our ideals aside. And for the young people, practicality is a good thing. There are times where compromise is necessary. That's part of wisdom. But it's also important to hang on to what you believe — to know what you believe and then be willing to stand up for it. And what's true for individuals is also true for countries.

The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.

Theodor W. Adorno

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

Theodor W. Adorno

The ideals that are the starting point for every revolution — America's revolution, Cuba's revolution, the liberation movements around the world — those ideals find their truest expression, I believe, in democracy. Not because American democracy is perfect, but precisely because we're not. And we — like every country — need the space that democracy gives us to change. It gives individuals the capacity to be catalysts to think in new ways, and to reimagine how our society should be, and to make them better.

I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.

Charlie Chaplin

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.

All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.

Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and…it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path…. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.

Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation.

Albert Einstein

The aim (of education) must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals who, however, see in the service to the community their highest life problem.

Albert Einstein

Every man is an infinitely repelling orb, and holds his individual being on that condition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Concerning the Gods, there are who deny the very existence of the Godhead; others say that it exists, but neither bestirs nor concerns itself nor has forethought for anything. A third party attribute to it existence and forethought, but only for great and heavenly matters, not for anything that is on earth. A fourth party admit things on earth as well as in heaven, but only in general, and not with respect to each individual. A fifth, of whom were Ulysses and Socrates, are those that cry:— I move not without Thy knowledge!

But I must add that the U.S. government must not, as by this order, undertake to run the churches. When an individual, in a church or out of it, becomes dangerous to the public interest, he must be checked; but let the churches, as such take care of themselves. It will not do for the U.S. to appoint Trustees, Supervisors, or other agents for the churches.

Abraham Lincoln