Integrity / Individuality Quotes

A. A. Milne: 

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

Abraham Lincoln: 

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me.

Alan Alda: 

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

Albert Camus: 

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Albert Camus: 

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Albert Einstein: 

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime. . . 

Albert Einstein: 

Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual. 
statement, England, September 15, 1933 


Albert Schweitzer: 

Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds, and in opposition to it -- a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.

Aldous Huxley: 

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Anna Quindlen: 

Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.

Anne Frank: 

Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that a quiet conscience makes one strong.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery: 

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.

Archibald Macleish: 

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

Audrey Hepburn: 

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.

Barbara De Angelis: 

Living with integrity means: 
Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships. 
Asking for what you want and need from others. 
Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension. 
Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values. 
Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe. 


Bette Midler: 

Cherish forever what makes you unique, ‘cuz you're really a yawn if it goes.

Betty Friedan: 

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. 
The Feminine Mystique, 1963 


Bishop Desmond Tutu: 

We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.

Blaise Pascal: 

We are all something, but none of us are everything.

Buddha: 

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true. [paraphrased]

Buddha: 

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.

Carl Jung: 

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, 'Something is out of tune.'

Carl Rogers: 

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

Carl Sagan: 

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Christopher Reeve: 

I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do.

Confucius: 

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

Denise Levertov: 

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Emily Dickinson: 

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

This entry continued ...
Epictetus: 

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.

Eugene V. Debs: 

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
1908 speech


Felix Adler: 

The conception of worth, that each person is an end per se, is not a mere abstraction. Our interest in it is not merely academic. Every outcry against the oppression of some people by other people, or against what is morally hideous is the affirmation of the principle that a human being as such is not to be violated. A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered. 
An Ethical Philosophy of Life


Franklin Thomas: 

One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings. 
in Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 1983


G. H. Hardy: 

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

Georg C. Lichtenberg: 

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

Goethe: 

To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.

H. G. Wells: 

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

HH the Dalai Lama: 

Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.

This entry continued ...
HH the Dalai Lama: 

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Harold Bloom: 

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

Harriet Goldhor Lerner: 

Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

Harriet Woods: 

You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.

Helen Keller: 

A man can't make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.

Henri Nouwen: 

Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.

Henry David Thoreau: 

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau: 

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC: 

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

Izaak Walton: 

The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.

Janis Joplin: 

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.

Jim Rohn: 

The more you care, the stronger you can be.

John Dewey: 

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Jone Johnson Lewis: 

The human condition is that we are individuals in relationship, and there are tensions between individuality and relatedness. A humanist spirituality is not one of complete dependence, nor of complete independence -- neither condition can be defended as primary. Rather, a humanist spirituality is one of interdependence.

Joseph Campbell: 

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

Keshavan Nair: 

With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.

Lorraine Hansberry: 

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which makes you lonely.

Lucille Ball: 

I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.

M. Scott Peck: 

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual - for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.

M. Scott Peck: 

Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.

Margaret Chase Smith: 

Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character.

Margaret Mead: 

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

Margaret Wheatley: 

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone [from Never Eat Alone]

Martin Buber: 

A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Mary Pettibone Poole: 

To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it,
requires brains.

Meredith Jordan: 

Whatever you have forgotten, you can remember. Whatever you have buried you can unearth. If you are willing to look deep into your own nature, if you are willing to peel away the layers of not-self you have adopted in making your way through the tribulations of life, you will find that your true self is not as far removed as you think.

Mohandas Gandhi: 

My life is an indivisible whole, and all my attitudes run into one another; and they all have their rise in my insatiable love for mankind.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Nancy Friday: 

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.

Paul Anka: 

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
My friends, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Paul Gruchow: 

It is one thing to decry the rat race...that is the good and honorable work of moralists. It is quite another thing to quit the rat race, to drop out, to refuse to run any further -- that is the work of the individualist. It is offensive because it is impolite; it makes the rebuke personal; the individualist calls not his or her behavior into question, but mine. 
Our Sustainable Table, 1990 


Pearl S. Buck: 

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

Pearl S. Buck: 

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Peter F. Drucker: 

The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society. 
in Arthur Goodfriend, What Is America?, 1954


Rabbi Zusya: 

In the world to come, I shall not be asked, "Why were you not Moses?" I shall be asked, "Why were you not Zusya?"

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 
Go put your creed into the deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is in his nature, and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite productiveness.
from "Spiritual Laws"


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion . . . It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Make the most of yourself for that is all there is of you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious.
The Conservative


Ramona L. Anderson: 

People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Robert Frost: 

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Robert Louis Stevenson: 

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Robert Schuller: 

As we grow as unique persons, we learn to respect the uniqueness of others.

Roy Croft: 

I love you
Not only for what you are
But for what I am 
When I am with you 
Love (first stanza) 


Samuel Johnson: 

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

Sara Teasdale: 

No one worth possessing can be quite possessed.

Simone Weil: 

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.

Susan B. Anthony: 

Independence is happiness.

Theodore H. White: 

To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.

Theodore Roosevelt: 

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910


Vanessa Redgrave: 

Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success.

Victor Frankl: 

If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.

Victor Frankl: 

Everything can be taken from a man but ... the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Virginia Satir: 

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.

Virginia Satir: 

Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.

Virginia Woolfe: 

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Voltaire: 

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

William Ellery Channing: 

I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion.

William Ellery Channing: 

I have expressed my strong interest in the mass of the people; and this is founded, not on their usefulness to the community, so much as on what they are in themselves.... Indeed every man (sic), in every condition, is great. It is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. A man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. The grandeur of his nature turns to insignificance all outward distinctions.

William James: 

The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.

William Menninger: 

Six essential qualities that are the key to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom, charity.

William Shakespeare: 

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.

Winston Churchill: 

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Zelda Fitzgerald: 

Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes. 
Save Me the Waltz, 1932