There’s no question that Individuality is a highly prized quality in our society. We celebrate those who march to the beat of their own drum, and admire people who have the courage to be themselves. But what does it really mean to be an individual? And how do we find our Individual voice in a world that seems so focused on conformity?

In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the most insightful quotes about individuality, and reflect on what they mean for us as individuals. Enjoy!

Quotes about Individuality

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Albert Einstein

Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.

Jane Goodall

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most talented, thought-provoking, game-changing people are never normal.

Richard Branson 

To become a person does not necessarily mean to be well adjusted, well adapted, approved of by others. It means to become who you are. We are meant to become more eccentric, more peculiar, more odd. We are not meant just to fit in. We are here to be different. We are here to be the individual.

James Hollis

Your individuality is the most valuable thing you have.

Martha Beck

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

E. E. Cummings

The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.

Rita Mae Brown

Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.

Bernard Baruch

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The things that make me different are the things that make me.

A. A. Milne

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Carl Jung

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Margaret Mead

I’ve come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that’s as unique as a fingerprint – and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.

Oprah Winfrey

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

Oscar Wilde

In the moment of our creation we receive the stamp of our individuality; and much of life is spent in rubbing off or defacing the impression.

Augustus William Hare

I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.

Ayn Rand

They are a very extensive minority who have suffered discrimination and who have the same right to participation in the promise and fruits of society as every other individual.

Bella Abzug

A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.

Oscar Wilde

Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.

Ben Shahn

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

Bernard DeVoto

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.

Bharati Mukherjee

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

Steve Jobs

Fashion can be bought by anybody; style takes discernment, it has to do with individuality.

Bill Blass

I certainly and deliberately introduced a great deal of variety into the people in the clamshell, which I suppose grows out of growing up in an individualistic society we profess to have.

Bill Reid

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that-either now or in the uncertain future-patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

Bruce Schneier

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Capitalism is the only system that can make freedom, individuality, and the pursuit of values possible in practice.

Ayn Rand

Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.

C. S. Lewis

Literary Experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.. .Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

C. S. Lewis

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Mark Twain

I am increasingly an architect of self. I am free to will and choose. I can, through accepting my individuality… become more of my uniqueness, more of my potentiality.

Carl Rogers

I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.

Mahatma Gandhi

An individual’s treatment and alternatives in life may depend as much on the reputation of the group to which that person belongs as on their own merit.

Catharine MacKinnon

A person is an individual substance of a rational nature.

Boethius

Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.

Charles Horton Cooley

Each day has its own individuality of color.

Charles Webster Hawthorne

…if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

Salman Rushdie

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde

The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.

Oscar Wilde

Call me however what thou wilt, I am who I must be. I call myself Zarathustra.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Phrases like ‘the team spirit’ is always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties.

Muriel Spark

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our greatest endeavor must be to make ourselves irreplaceable.

Miguel de Unamuno

Who would you be but who you are?

Terry Brooks

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

E. E. Cummings.

I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps, from the hour I was born.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.

Carl Jung

Who can say more than this rich praise, that you alone are you.

William Shakespeare

Everybody likes to go their own way, to choose their own time and manner of devotion.

Jane Austen

Life might take you down different roads. But each of you gets to decide which one to take.

Gayle Forman

Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him.

Albert Einstein

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

Charlotte Brontë

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Oscar Wilde

Our individuality is all, all, that we have.

Tom Robbins

Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.

John Jakes

It is beneath human dignity to lose one’s individuality and become a mere cog in the machine.

Mahatma Gandhi

…the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person…

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.

M. Scott Peck

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Oscar Wilde

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

Stephen King

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

Joseph Campbell

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you.

Vincent O’Sullivan

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

Coco Chanel

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality.

James F. Cooper

Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale.

Bertrand Russell

You can be nobody but yourself. You cannot hide away, nor be lost in any crowd. You carry the glory and the burden of your individuality.

Henry Whitney Bellows

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

Anais Nin

Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.

Peter Conrad

Find your own way, open your treasure house, invent your own answer to the chaos.

Gertrude Stein

Individuality is, to the rational man, the same that breath, the circulation of blood, is to the animal.

Leo Tolstoy

Parting Words

We hope you’ve enjoyed these quotes about individuality as much as we have. Free thinkers are the backbone of society and it’s important to remember that everyone has their own unique path in life.

What’s your favorite quote about individuality? Let us know in the comments below – we’d love to hear from you!

You might also enjoy these related quote collections:

• Quotes About The Road Less Traveled
• Quotes About Slowing Down in Life
• Quotes About Life Direction
• Quotes About Nonconformity
• Quotes About Life Obstacles

The post Quotes About Individuality for Independent Thinkers appeared first on Flâneur Life.