Emile Durkheim Quotes

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.

With all the things that you could be, you never could learn how to be me.

Carving out an identity for yourself is important so I'm trying to do that as well.

Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.

Unlike a drop of water which loses its identity when it joins the ocean, man does not lose his being in the society in which he lives. Man's life is independent. He is born not for the development of the society alone, but for the development of his self.

Our subjectivity is so completely our own.

It is more important to be a personality than a person who is in a political party.

Mickey is his own person.

Janhvi has her own individuality.

I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.

Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.

The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being.

Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual."

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

If I'd wanted to be an individual, I'd have taken up tennis.

I think everybody wants to be their own person and be an individual.

I support anyone's right to be who they want to be. My question is: to what extent do I have to participate in your self-image?

Every act is an act of self definition.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

This is my life; these are my fingerprints; I'm unique; this is what I want to do. You worry about your own front porch and what's happening in your own world.

A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character.

I don't want people to define me. That's the best way for an actor to grow.

I am my own person with my own experiences, personality, and definition of success.