Quotes about Individuality

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.

I myself am made up of so many people.

Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries.

What seems more important are the private independent acts that become more necessary every day.

As we grow into maturity in Christ our distinctiveness is accentuated, not blunted. General directions, useful as they are, don't take into account the details that face us as holiness takes root in the particular social and personal place we are planted.

There is no model conversion. There is no prescribed ritual, whether emotional or liturgical. We are all different. God is the same and has the same salvation to work in us, but he creates an original story every time.

But if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.

These labels are inevitable and in many ways useful but the common element to them is that they are impersonal and partial; when they become all-encompassing, which they too frequently do, they distort our core identity. They say almost nothing, or what is even worse, the wrong thing, about who we actually are.

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

I don't think I represent some new category. I think I do represent kind of a freethinker.

Even the greatest musicians, they only represent themselves. You represent who you are and what your experiences are and what you have in your heart, and it's the same for me. I represent who I am and what I've been through and what I'm bringing to the music.