Topic

Individualism

Curie opens the tension: you must work for your own improvement and simultaneously share general responsibility for all humanity. James: an idea must arrive with the force of revelation to be worth anything. Carnegie on competition ensuring survival of the fittest — which he found reassuring about institutions, if not about individuals. Channing on every person being intended to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do. Emerson on traveling more usefully alone because you reflect more. Every man regards his own life as New Year's Eve of time, the center of the universe. The collection is not naive about individualism: it is interested in the balance between self-cultivation and the obligations incurred by it.

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

Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters.

Source: Northanger Abbey (1817)

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

Source: Mansfield Park (1814)

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

Source: The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.

Source: Psychology: Briefer Course (1892)

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together

Let us live for the beauty of our own reality

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend

The only good husbands stay bachelors: They're too considerate to get married

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.

If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve

Every man regards his own life as the New Year's Eve of time.

There is just one life for each of us: our own

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies