Theme of the following quotations: Being reveals itself uniquely through each person. As children, we are socialized to become members of our culture. Without further psychological maturation, each person’s unique potential may succumb to conformity. Living authentically instead asks that we honor and reveal that unique potential.
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At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900),
German philosopher
But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the word’s phenomena intersect only once in this way and never again.
~ Herman Hesse (1877-1962),
German author,
in Demian
We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.
~ James Hollis,
contemporary Jungian analyst and author,
in What Matters Most
What struck me when I read that in the thirteenth-century Queste de Saint Graal, was that it epitomizes an especially Western spiritual aim and ideal, which is, of living the life that is potential in you and was never in anyone else as a possibility.
This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.
~ Joseph Campbell (1904-1987),
American educator and mythologist,
in The Power of Myth
In becoming fully human, we are called to be individuals. We are called to be unique and different.
~ M. Scott Peck (1936-2005),
American psychiatrist and author
in The Different Drum
Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962),
former first lady of the United States and humanitarian
The eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Herder taught that each person has an original and unique manner of being human. The task is to develop it. According to Nietzsche, a person is known by his “style,” that is, by the unique pattern that gives unity and distinctiveness to a person’s activities. Style articulates the uniqueness of the self. Rather than fitting one’s life into the demands of external conformity, rather than living one’s life as an imitation of the life of another, one should look to find the authentic self within. One should labor to develop one’s own unique style in crafting one’s soul. An individual who denies her own individuality articulates life with a voice other than that which is uniquely her own. A person who suppresses his own self is in danger of missing the point of his own existence, of surrendering what being human means.
~ Rabbi Byron L. Sherwin,
contemporary Jewish theologian,
in Crafting the Soul
There is only one you in the world, just one, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.
~ Martha Graham (1894-1991),
American choreographer
It is the duty of every person in Israel to know and to consider that he is unique in the world in his particular character and that there has never been anyone like him in the world, for if there had been someone like him, there would have been no need for him to be in the world. Every single man is a new thing in the world and is called upon to fulfill his particularity in the world.
~ Martin Buber (1878-1965),
Jewish philosopher
in The Way of Man
If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832),
German poet, dramatist, novelist, and scientist.
The wise Rabbi Bunam once said in old age, when he had already grown blind: “I should not like to change places with our father Abraham! What good would it do God if Abraham became like blind Bunam, and blind Bunam became like Abraham? Rather than have this happen, I think I shall try to become a little more myself.”
The same idea was expressed with even greater pregnancy by Rabbi Zusya, when he said a short while before his death: “In the world to come I shall not be asked: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I shall be asked: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
~ Martin Buber (1878-1965),
Jewish philosopher,
in The Way of Man
~ see also the post, “Being Asked to Be More Yourself”
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. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?
~ Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862),
American author and naturalist,
in Walden
To be nobody-but-yourself
in a world which is doing its best,
night and day
to make you everybody else
means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight;
and never stop fighting
~ e. e. cummings (1894-1962),
American poet
in E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962
If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is best, not because it is best in itself, but because it is his own mode.
~ John Stuart Mill (1806-1873),
English philosopher, economist,
in Three Essays
A person is authentic in that degree to which his being in the world is unqualifiedly in accord with the givenness of his own nature and of the world.
~ James Bugental (1915-2008),
American existential humanistic psychologist,
in The Search for Authenticity
Become him who you are!
~ Pindar
(522 BC–443 BC),
Greek Poet,
quoted by Hollingdale in Nietzsche
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