Louise Berliawsky Nevelson Quotes

Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person. And to retain this right, you will have to be willing to take the social or external risks involved in ignoring pressures to do things the way others say they should be done

If you live the way others want you to, you are called a nice guy. If you live the way you want, you are called selfish.

I didn't want people to decide what I was going to wear and what I was going to look like and how I should behave.

I don't want to live up to how people expect me to be.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

Every single person, pretty much, is taught what they're supposed to do: go to school, get a job, find someone to love, get married, have kids, raise the kids, and then die. Nobody questions that. What if you want to do something different?

Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.

I want it to resonate: there's no rule for how to live your life. You can do things your own way.

You don't have to make your life look like anybody else says it should look.

You just gotta live your life and do it your way.

No rebellious heart is ever at ease with paths established by others.

You can't live your life to suit other people. The harder you try, the more restrictions they'll put on you just for the fun of seeing you jump through their hoops.

I'm not going to be a rebel and offend anybody, but I'm not going to live in somebody else's image.

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.

All in all you're just another brick in the wall

[American] conformism might approximate collectivism, not so much in economic respects, and not too much in political respects, but very much in the pattern of daily life and thought. Whether this will happen or not, and if it does to what degree, is partly dependent on the power of resistance in those who represent the opposite pole of the courage to be, the courage to be as oneself.

Our modern ideas of 'functioning' through things are really quite inhuman. We have this idea that no matter what is going on we still have to color between the lines, act normal.

There's people trying to tell me what to do, but I'm not like some marketing scam.

I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.

I just want people to admit that there's no one way to live your life.

I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy.

I've noticed that most people tend to go through life preserving their differences from others.

I've always done everything at my disposal to avoid labeling what I do, or to avoid being labeled myself.

You just have to do your own thing, no matter what anyone says. It's your life.

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.