Phillips Brooks Quotes

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.

In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

My whole career has been trying to please people in basketball. Now it's time to please myself.

Follow your own passion - not your parents', not your teachers' - yours.

When you don't have children you have to define and make your own purpose, and make your own reason for being here.

It is an obvious fact that when an age is torn loose from its moorings and everyone is to some degree thrown on his own, most people can take steps to find and realize themselves.

In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.

Now that I'm older, I understand that it's up to the individual to decide who they are or what they are.

The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.

I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

For so long, I was searching for something to be proud of. But at a certain point, I realized, 'Wait, I'm doing what I want to be doing. I'm not wanting to do it; I'm doing it.' And that's awesome.

Each man must learn his own ideal and try to accomplish it: that is a surer way of progress than to take the ideas of another.

The only knowledge which satisfies us is one which is subject to no external standards but springs from the inner life of the personality.

My parents have always advocated doing what I love to do.

To find the courage to do what I want to do for myself has been hard.

More having to do whatever anybody said you had to do. I couldn't really do anything on my own. But as I got older and then came to America and then Grace became my name, it somehow freed me. All of a sudden, I can be this other person.

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.

You just get out there and be what you want to be. That's part of evolving and part of staying true to yourself - part of remaining alive in a real authentic, long-term sense creatively: not listening to what other people tell you to be.

It has been my observation that the happiest of people, the vibrant doers of the world, are almost always those who are using - who are putting into play, calling upon, depending upon-the greatest number of their God-given talents and capabilities.

I want women to learn to find themselves.

Psychoanalysis - and any good therapy - is a method of increasing one's awareness of destiny in order to increase one's experience of freedom.

I get to do what I love and communicate whatever I want.

Success in any endeavor depends on the degree to which it is an expression of your true self.