Florence Scovel Shinn Quotes

Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone- over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience- I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?

Every man and woman is born into the world to do something unique and something distinctive and if he or she does not do it, it will never be done.

A human being is a single being. Unique and unrepeatable.

I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.

I believe everyone is born into the world to do something unique and distinctive.

Somebody who is unique - and this will get me into trouble - by definition cannot be replaced.

You are here to do something you are uniquely created for. No one else can do it like you can, that's why you're here

I'm one of those people who likes to be the only redhead in the village.

I believe that everybody was born with a kind of uniqueness. There is never going to be somebody else with the same DNA as you, with the same experiences. There is something that you were meant to do as an individual. You have some kind of creative skill. It can either be creating your own business in some level, being a writer, an artist, whatever, or it can even be working within a company, but from within that company you're creating something.

The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.

Every person born into the world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique....If there had been someone like her in the world, there would have been no need for her to be born." --Martin Buber as quoted in Narrative Means for Sober Ends, by Jon Diamond, p.78

When I say "I," I mean a thing absolutely unique, not to be confused with any other.

More than a career, I feel that I've got a function. I see things in a much more holistic way. Some people bake the bread, and some people write the songs.

The main thing, of course, always, is the fact that there is only one of you in the world, just one, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost. Ambition is not enough; necessity is everything.

One circumstance tormented me then: Namely, that no one else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am only one, and they are all.

When each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made.... There is only this strange recognition of present otherness.

One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.

Each child is sent into this world by God with a "Unique Message" to deliver, a new personal act of love to bestow

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?

They can say whatever they want to say, but it is going to be hard, my friend, to duplicate me.

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience.

A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person; each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.