Robert Henri Quotes

Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.

All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, "Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don't be a part of the crowd; don't be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own. Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears." But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it.

The kids are not brought up to have minds of their own as individuals.

I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

I understand it's difficult but you've got to think about yourself, you know, and not just follow the crowd.

I'm not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I'd rather be figured out.

I know that we shall meet problems along the way, but I'd far rather see for myself what's going on in the world outside, than rely on newspapers, television, politicians and religious leaders to tell me what I should be thinking.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

I was never ideological in any sense, or a slave to any particular politics or religion. My solace and my inspiration always came from books and literature.

Sometimes we need to take some time to reflect. Sometimes we need to do something different. Sometimes we need to do something not because others are doing it so we want to do the same, but because it is different.

From the moment we are born, people tell us that the world is like this and like that, this way, that way. It is natural that - for a certain period of time - we end up believing what we are told. But we must soon push these ideas aside and discover our own way of living reality.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living...To live is to find out for yourself what is true.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Any man who is really a man must learn to be alone in the midst of others, to think alone for others, and, if necessary, against others.

It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.

To be an individual is the hardest thing in the world, because nobody likes you to be an individual. Everybody wants to kill your individuality and to make a sheep out of you. Nobody wants you to be on your own.

Wake-up! Think for yourself, be yourself and return to what is real.

I believe that before anything else I'm a human being -- just as much as you are... or at any rate I shall try to become one. I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Torvald, and that you have warrant for it in books; but I can't be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what's in books. I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.

Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it.

Be self aware, rather than a repetitious robot

It's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism. This can be tricky at times, I suppose, but then so can the tango - particularly if you're dancing alone.