Individual Life Quotes

There is provided an escape from the narrowness and poverty of the individual life, and the possibility of a life which is other and larger than our own, yet which is most truly our own. For, to be ourselves, we must be more than ourselves. What we call love is, in truth ... the losing of our individual selves to gain a larger self. ~ John Caird

Wherever the Bible has been consistently applied, it has dramatically changed the civilization and culture of those who have accepted its teaching. No other book has ever so dramatically changed the individual lives and society in general. ~ John F. Walvoord

Unlike the clonal longevity of asexual organisms, sexually reproduced plants and animals usually have briefer, individual life cycles. In short, the enormous diversity afforded by the evolutionary invention of sexual reproduction came with a price - death of the individual. ~ Richard J. Borden

You never cease to be unique. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends
the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!
Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. ~ H. Rider Haggard

Every civilization built upon riches has died stillborn, ebbed away or fallen of its own weight. Once the inner eye glimpses wealth, the individual life is no longer of interest. The personal on every level becomes insignificant. Wives are abandoned, children discarded. Expendability rules. Gold erases the past, you see. It erases the mercy of God. ~ Margaret Lawrence

When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him ... It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labor. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward ... Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of envy for the people who lived this life, but that day for the first time ... the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the state are subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide it but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples. ~ H.G.Wells

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Through systematic meditation one can awaken the third eye and touch the cosmic awareness. Sushumna nadi is the subtle pathway in the spinal cord which passes through the main psychic centers. The awakening of these centers means a gradual expansion of awareness, until it reaches the cosmic awareness. Each center has its own beauty and gracefulness. Through generations of ignorance and unconsciousness, this channel of awareness becomes obscured and hidden. Meditation is to become aware about this internal life energy. Meditation is the procedure to rearrange, harmonize, activate, and integrate the individual life energy with the cosmic life energy. ~ Amit Ray

Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life's secrets. It's the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. 'We are too ego-centered,' Suzuki tells Cage.' The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away. ~ Kay Larson

The environment acts more strongly upon the individual life the less fixed and strong this individual life may be. ~ Maria Montessori

I am a black man, born in Jamaica, B.W.I., and have been living in America for the last years. It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable … Looking about me with bigger and clearer eyes I saw that this cruelty in different ways was going on all over the world. Whites were exploiting and oppressing whites even as they exploited and oppressed the yellows and blacks. And the oppressed, groaning under the leash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows. I ceased to think of people and things in the mass. [O]ne must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself. ~ Claude McKay

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not. ~ Nick Harkaway

We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes - a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself. ~ Stefan Zweig

I realized after being married for some time that it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to lead an individual life where I loved on person and we created a world together. ~ Frederick Lenz

Viewing ecology through the lens of individual life histories or the life cycles of species makes it easy to grasp the Hindu conception of life as drama. Every creature and plant has a separate path of sustenance and survival on the way to their final dance with Shiva. ~ Richard J. Borden

In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the short time that your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decent steps, for God's sake. ~ Tom Piazza

The British Empire has advanced to a new conception of autonomyand freedom, to the idea of a system of British nations, each freely ordering its own individual life, but bound together in unity byallegiance to one Crown, and co-operating in all that concerns the common weal. ~ George VI

The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.
We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.
Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.
There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its ~ Leo Tolstoy

The way of Zen is to become independent and strong. Don't rely on others for perceptions of life and truth. Do it individually. Go to a teacher of Zen to learn how to do that, not to get answers for individual life situations. ~ Frederick Lenz

An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole? ~ Isaac Asimov

If we only live through the eyes of the others and don't try to capture the vibration of our own individual experience, we may miss out the beam and brilliance of authenticity that is essential to move forward in life ~ Erik Pevernagie

When I think of a place of worship, I think of a place where one can sit and be reminded of all the things that are important outside our individual lives. To express spirituality, the architect has to think of the original material of architecture, space and light. ~ Richard Meier

People who personify the system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life- and everyone knows it. ~ Guy Debord

P11- when people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them they experience well being
12- we are frequently told that the problems of our decade.. have shifted from the external realm of economics and now have to do with the quality of individual life. ~ C. Wright Mills

Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave. ~ Bertrand Russell

One of the goals of life is to try and be in touch with one's most personal themes-the values, the ideas, styles, colors that are the touchstones of one's own individual life, its real texture and substance. ~ Gloria Vanderbilt

Victim complex are so dangerous because they automatically attract imperious and authoritative individuals in their lives ~ Sunday Adelaja

But what about a person's anger? What about her voice? Her laughter? Her arrogance? Her irreverence? Her humor, her ego, her honor, her character? Do these fingerprints of an individual life simply evaporate and disappear with the last exhale? And if that is so, what use all this struggle, misery and strife? What difference whether a woman ever lived or not? Whether she was loved or unloved, educated or illiterate, wanted or unwanted by her parents, whether or not she suffered hurt and betrayal, or whether she still managed to retain her humanity and nobility? In the end, Bhima thinks, it doesn't matter. It is all ash and dust. This is what it means to be human, she thinks: Grains of dust arranged in human form - some dark, some light, some tall, some short, some male, some female. And in the end, the same gust of wind breaks them all down. ~ Thrity Umrigar

I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front. ~ Bruce Feiler

If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others. ~ Erich Fromm

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. ~ Bertrand Russell

Freeman's theory helps to explain how love and plasticity affect each other. Plasticity allows us to develop brains so unique in response to our individual life experiences - that it is often hard to see the world as others do, to want what they want, or to cooperate. But the successful reproduction of our species requires cooperation. What nature provides, in a neuromodulator like oxytocin, is the ability for two brains in love to go through a period of heightened plasticity, allowing them to mold to each other and shape each other's intentions and perceptions. The brain for Freeman is fundamentally an organ of socialization, and so there must be a mechanism that, from time to time, undoes our tendency to become overly individualized, overly self-involved, and too self-centered. ~ Norman Doidge

It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race - scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. ~ Philip Roth

Prayer is a walk with God ... We can minister to the Lord as a group but I'll tell you one thing about it, you'll never have that intimacy of ministering to the Lord and worshiping Him with a group that you'll have in your own individual life. ~ Kenneth E. Hagin

When the world begins to overwhelm you, it is because you are looking too far from your own path. Do not grieve for those you do not know. Do not suffer for those you cannot help. Do not take into your heart the millions around the world. Compassion is learned in the context of your individual life. Respond fully and openly to those who present themselves to you. They are the guardians and guideposts of your unique lessons. ~ Zoe Nicholson

On the level of
history, as in individual life, murder is thus a desperate exception or it is nothing. The disturbance that it
brings to the order of things offers no hope of a future; it is an exception and therefore it can be neither
utilitarian nor systematic as the purely historical attitude would have it. It is the limit that can be reached
but once, after which one must die. The rebel has only one way of reconciling himself with his act of
murder if he allows himself to be led into performing it: to accept his own death and sacrifice. He kills
and dies so that it shall be clear that murder is impossible. He demonstrates that, in reality, he prefers the
"We are" to the "We shall be." The calm happiness of Kaliayev in his prison, the serenity of Saint-Just
when he walks toward the scaffold, are explained in their turn. Beyond that farthest frontier, con-tradition
and nihilism begin. ~ Albert Camus

If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? ~ Thomas Pynchon

Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth. ~ Thomas Huxley

The True Will is the will of the deepest inmost Self - the core of who you really are as a spiritual being. Also, and importantly, it is an expression of the universal will, as particularized and expressed in your individual life. This is why, when we are living in accordance with our True Will, we find that much of the time the universe seems to open up a path right in front of us, as if in sympathy with our aims. ~ David Shoemaker

When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written it, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to recreate hope and restore life. It has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. It has, inexplicably and savingly, provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Each person leaves a legacy--a single, small piece of herself, which makes richer each individual life and the collective life of humanity as a whole. But do not despair, for despair is a despicable and bourgeois affectation; we must not allow it. As for what happens next, well, as the Cuban poet Regino Pedroso once said, "como forjamos el hierro, forjaremos días nuevos": as we hammer out iron, we shall hammer out new days. ~ John Nichols

That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately - ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors - coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sue generous explorations. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity' something quite different, relating to the planet's life-span, not individual life-span. ~ Thomas Browne

The work of each individual contributes to a totality, and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives - past and present and to come - forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole? Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you. ~ Isaac Asimov

The baggage in your individual life will weigh down your married life. Do something about it. ~ Ted Lowe

Sometimes to stand out you need to sit down. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

The idea to use backpacks came from my visit to Sichuan after the earthquake in May 2008. During the earthquake many schools collapsed. Thousands of young students lost their lives, and you could see bags and study material everywhere. Then you realize individual life, media, and the lives of the students are serving very different purposes. The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything. ~ Ai Weiwei

Beyond a hundred years even generating a basic scenario for individual life or society becomes difficult, let alone extending compassion across much greater reaches of time towards the unborn inhabitants of worlds-to-be. As a species, we have proved to be good historians but poor futurologists. ~ Robert Macfarlane

He said that the workings of God can be discerned only in retrospect and that he is always skeptical of people who speculate on God's will for the future, either the future of the world or of an individual life. ~ Jessica Mesman Griffith

We found out that, contrary to what many people thought, in the immune system, genes can change during the life cycle of the individual. ~ Susumu Tonegawa

In the same way it may be said that a man endowed with great mental gifts leads, apart from the individual life common to all, a second life, purely of the intellect. He devotes himself to the constant increase, rectification and extension, not of mere learning, but of real systematic knowledge and insight; and remains untouched by the fate that overtakes him personally, so long as it does not disturb him in his work. It is thus a life which raises a man and sets him above fate and its changes. Always thinking, learning, experimenting, practicing his knowledge, the man soon comes to look upon this second life as the chief mode of existence, and his merely personal life as something subordinate, serving only to advance ends higher than itself. An example of this independent, separate existence is furnished by Geothe. During the war in the Champagne, and amid all the bustle of the camp, he made observations for his theory of color; and as soon as the numberless calamities of that war allowed of his retiring for a short time to the fortress of Luxembourg, he took up the manuscript of his Farbenlehre. This is an example which we, the salt of the earth, should endeavor to follow, by never letting anything disturb us in the pursuit of our intellectual life, however much the storm of the world may invade and agitate our personal environment; always remembering that we are the songs, not of the bondwoman, but of the free. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan. ~ Erik Erikson

I have found the temperament of being a thoughtful man is sometimes excruciatingly painful. People become accustomed to the fact that your kindness is part of your personality and therefore any action you take will be based on being civil minded toward others and seemingly not wanting to disappoint anyone. This is of course the wrong view. Being thoughtful does not mean you are a pushover or a stuck in the mud type, seemingly stationary in your attitudes and ambitions. It means you take the time to have consideration of events and people around you. You do not make hasty decisions based solely on observation or emotion. Analysis is a tool for the thoughtful individual ~ Levon Peter Poe

Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system. ~ Grant Morrison

Intrinsic personal value - the foundation of ethical value - starts when our individual life journeys begin. It ends only with the cessation of our existence. ~ John F. Kavanaugh S.J.

Life is like a lunchroom at school. In this industry you've got little individual tables of actors, singers, rap stars, this, that, the other. But it's a big industry that also encompasses anyone in the public eye. ~ Hayden Panettiere

As we walk our individual life journeys, we pick up resentments and hurts, which attach themselves to our souls like burrs clinging to a hiker's socks. These stowaways may seem insignificant at first, but, over time, if we do not occasionally stop and shake them free, the accumulation becomes a burden to our souls. ~ Richard Paul Evans

In the USA, where so many people compete for one and the same thing, where job opportunities, residential facilities, and food resources have to be spread over so many people, the question of justice becomes more imperative than ever before if communal and individual life is to be made possible and enjoyable. ~ Ndabaningi Sithole

There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the more abstract it's interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him ~ Leo Tolstoy

Your main target should be to find and develop your own unique individuality and not let your focus be sidetracked and drift to external things ~ Sunday Adelaja

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. ~ Ocean Vuong

For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future ... Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time ... ~ Rachel Carson

With only one life to live we can't afford to live it only for itself. Somehow we must each for himself, find the way in which we can make our individual lives fit into the pattern of all the lives which surround it. We must establish our own relationships to the whole. And each must do it in his own way, using his own talents, relying on his own integrity and strength, climbing his own road to his own summit. ~ Hortense Odlum

There's never going to be peace in the world until there's peace in nations. There's never going to be peace in nations till there's peace in communities and families and in individual lives. ~ Rick Warren

Instead of the concrete individual, you have the names of organizations and, at the highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality. The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the State (raison d'etat). Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in the individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are just as much social units as the ruled, and are distinguished only by the fact they are specialized mouthpieces of State doctrine. They do not need to be personalities capable of judgment, but thoroughgoing specialists who are unusable outside their line of business. State policy decides what shall be taught and studied. ~ C.G. Jung

Reverence for life is more than solicitude or sensitivity for life. It is a sense of the whole, a capacity for inspired response, a respect for the intricate universe of individual life. It is the supreme awareness of awareness itself. ~ Norman Cousins

When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.
The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The refle ~ Vasily Grossman

The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below; and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment of democracy; universal brotherhood can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity - of opportunity in the social, political and individual life. - from Bhagat Singh's prison diary, p. 124 ~ Bhagat Singh

When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all. ~ Joseph Campbell

Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning. ~ Josiah Royce

The true purpose of life is the perfection of humanity through individual effort, under the guidance of God's inspiration. Real life is response to the best within us. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, is to deprive one's self of the real joy of living. ~ David O. McKay

The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities of higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear - is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function.
There must be a definite functional relationship between individual life and group life.
For the individual without function and status, society is irrational, incalculable and shapeless.
The "rootless" individual, the outcast - for absence of social function and status casts a man from the society of his fellows - sees no society.
He sees only demoniac forces, half sensible, half meaningless, half in light and half in darkness, but never predictable.
They decide about his life and livelihood without the possibility of interference on his part, indeed without the possibility of understanding them.
He is like a blindfolded man in a strange room playing a game of which he does not know the rules. ~ Peter Drucker

If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical. ~ Herbert Read

No individual life is an end in itself. One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can live fully only by making ourselves answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time. ~ Wendell Berry

If a man speculates on what 'society' should do for the poor, he accepts thereby the collectivist premise that men's lives belong to society and that he, as a member of society, has the right to dispose of them ... that psychological confession reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men's capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life. ~ Ayn Rand

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. ~ Barry Lopez

You are what you are, and what you are is not me! ~ Anthony T. Hincks

Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

An individual's yearning to reach outside his life is a seed of greatness waiting for a stream of inspiration. Carving that stream to people's hearts is a simpler task if the endeavor you are leading them into is attached to a bigger story. ~ Mac Anderson

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture. ~ William Irwin Thompson

The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. ~ J.G. Ballard

Beliefs constitute the basic stratum, that which lies deepest, in the architecture of our life. By them we live, and by the same token we rarely think of them ... One may symbolize the individual life as a bank of issue. The bank lives on the credit of a gold reserve which is rarely seen, which lies at the bottom of metal coffers hidden in the vaults of the building. The most elementary caution will suggest that from time to time the effective condition of these guaranties
of these credences, one might say, that are the basis of credit
be passed in review. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man's rational faculty - the power of ideas. ~ Ayn Rand

The best social philosophies do not claim any greater objective than that the individual human beings living under such a regime shall have happy individual lives. If there are social philosophies which deny the happiness of the individual life as the final goal and aim of civilization, those philosophies are the product of a sick and unbalanced mind. ~ Lin Yutang

The training is a set of interpersonal interactions that lead to emotional and intellectual experiences that provide a circumstance and an intrument for self awareness, self observation and reflection on the circumstances of the subject trainee, both in his individual life and as a social being. ~ Humberto Maturana

There is great freedom in simplicity of living, and after I began to feel this, I found harmony in my life between inner and outer well-being. There is a great deal to be said about such harmony, not only for an individual life but also for the life of a society. It's because as a world we have gotten ourselves so far out of harmony, so way off on the material side, that when we discover something like nuclear energy we are still capable of putting it into a bomb and using it to kill people! This is because our inner well-being lags so far behind our outer well-being. ~ Peace Pilgrim

There is real danger in the world. And that is precisely why a correction is in order – new curricula containing some meaningful visionary thinking about the life of the moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context increasingly dangerous to its health. But if scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but "upgrade", where might we look for humanity's own future? ~ Toni Morrison

The ideal is the only absolute real; and it must become the real in the individual life as well, however impossible they may count it who never tried it. ~ George MacDonald

The clock is Shandy's first symbol: under its influence, he is conceived and his misfortunes begin, which are the same thing according to this sign of time. Death is hidden in clocks, as Belli said, along with the unhappiness of individual life, of this fragment, of this thing that is divided, disintegrated, deprived of wholeness - death, which is time, the time of individuation, of separation, the abstract time that rolls toward its end. Tristram Shandy doesn't want to be born because he doesn't want to die. Any means, any weapon, can be used to save oneself from death and time. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fatal, inescapable points, then digressions lengthen that line - and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, and so rapid as to obscure their own tracks, then perhaps death won't find us again, perhaps time will lose its way, perhaps we'll be able to remain concealed in our ever-changing hiding places. These ~ Italo Calvino

That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed. ~ Josiah Royce

We came to the comforting conclusion that the Creator probably knew how to run His universe quite as well as we do, and that, after all, there are no such things as 'wasted' lives, saving and except when am individual wilfully squanders and wastes his own life ... ~ L.M. Montgomery

I have found that the many imbalances within our individual lives result in an overall more worldly balance. What I mean is that no matter how unfair I think something is, I need only look at the bigger picture to see how, in a way, it fits ... however impossible it is to understand it or see it at the time. ~ Cecelia Ahern

When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form
or a species
will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The connections that we have with others, the things we learn, and yes, our prayers - all of it is a web of connections that bind us into the fabric of reality and make us part of something greater than ourselves. And if our reality is only a tiny reflection of a much greater reality, still it is also an essential part. And the same is true of each individual life. Each deed and thought - each word between friends - adds a new thread to a tapestry so vast that we may never be able to step back and see the whole. ~ Yael Shahar

Sometimes it gets talked about as if life is all about the individual, and I don't think it is. I'm really interested in what writing can contribute to a kind of cultural intelligence. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming

It is a simple matter to see the obvious, to do the expected. The tendency of the individual life is to be static rather than dynamic, and this tendency is made into a propulsion by civilization, where the obvious only is seen, and the unexpected rarely happens. When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. They do not see what is not obvious, are unable to do the unexpected, are incapable of adjusting their well-grooved lives to other and strange grooves. In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die. ~ Jack London

The very essence of leadership is you have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion.
Whatever you value, be committed to it and let nothing distract you from this goal. The uncommitted life, like Plato's unexamined life, is not worth living. ~ Theodore M. Hesburgh