Individual Significance Quotes

Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world
~ Stephen King

Engage, educate, equip, encourage, empower, energize, and elevate. Those are the methods for maximizing the potential of any individual, team, organization, or institution for ultimate success and significance. Those are the methods of a mentor leader. ~ Tony Dungy

Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest. ~ Erving Goffman

Purpose expresses most deeply what makes you a unique individual. Your purpose defines who you are, how you live your life and how you lead. Your purpose provides you with inner strength and drive to live and lead each day. It equips you with what you need to face the challenges of the day and of life. Your purpose provides context and meaning to your life. ~ Thomas Narofsky

Success is completion. Success is being able to complete what we set out to do - each individual action, each specific step, each desired experience whether a big project or a very small errand. ~ Susan Collins

There is indeed a great force in the world, a force spiritual and able to shape the physical universe, but that force is not something cut off, not something separate from ourselves. It is the energy in us, the strongest in our working, breathing, thinking together as one people; weakest when we are scattered, confused, broken into individual, unconnected fragments. ~ Ayi Kwei Armah

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are like droplets of water in an ocean of consciousness; individual to an extent, but those droplets together make up the ocean
without the droplets there is no ocean. It is the same with this infinite energy mind we call creation/god. We are not part of that infinity
we are that infinity if we open ourselves up to reconnect with it. Wherever you stand in infinity, you are at the center of infinity. So everything that exists is everything that exists. I am everything that exists; and so are you
the more you realize that, the more you open up to the full infinity of who you are. ~ David Icke

There may be beings, thinking beings, near or surrounding us, which we do not perceive, which we cannot imagine. We know very little; but, in my opinion, we know enough to hope for the immortality, the individual immortality, of the better part of man. ~ Humphry Davy

I'm a passionate individual, and sometimes when I have strong feelings about a subject, I feel the need to express myself. ~ Megan Fox

I have a feeling we are going to be world champions, I can't really explain why. Brazil are probably the best team in the world in terms of individual players. But the team with the most gifted players do not always win. ~ Oliver Kahn

Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life
a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them? ~ George Eliot

Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic. ~ Ken Liu

It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as 'separateness' and the nearest approach to that selfish state which the laws of life permit is in the intent or motive. ~ Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

See, far above arrogance and selfishness on the rankings of undesirable Lifestyle traits, topping the lengthy list of carnal sins, occupying its very own stratosphere of unforgivable
reprehensibility, is lying. Without question, fibbing is the fastest way to secure a one-way trip to blackball status in the swing community. So assured is a liar's exile from the Lifestyle that should a perjurer come clean about a material untruth and still secure playtime, that individual will have rewritten the entire swing rulebook. And no matter how enticing it may be to rewrite history, I do not recommend attempting it. Not unless you're lusting after a celibate existence. ~ Daniel Stern

When you don't work together you can't emerge as a force. It becomes what some call a "lonely struggle" and individual self-destruction. ~ Haile Gerima

But, is it possible for princes and ministers to be enlightened, when private individuals are not so? ~ Jean-Baptiste Say

We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Meditation expands our inner being. The inner being is like a small, individual river flowering towards the Ocean.
In meditation, I feel how my inner being expands into an inner ocean, which is part of everything, which is one with Existence.
Through the inner being, we come in contact with the inner ocean, the undefined and boundless within ourselves, where we are one with life. We realize that God is part of life. We realize that God is not a person, but the consciousness that is part of everything. We find God in a flower, in a tree, in the eyes of a child or in a playful dog.
Through discovering our inner being, we discover that we are also part of the flower, the child or the dog. We realize that God is everywhere. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

However much pains may be taken to combine the soldier and the citizen in one and the same individual, whatever may be done to nationalize wars, never will it be possible to do away with the professionalism of the business; and if that cannot be done, then those who belong to it will always look upon themselves as a kind of guild, in the regulations, laws, and customs in which the "Spirit of War" finds its expression. It would be very wrong to look down upon this corporate spirit, or esprit de corps, which may and should exist more or less in every Army. ~ Carl Von Clausewitz

God seeks for your individual happiness above all other godly concerns. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

If you ask ... the man in the street ... the human significance of mathematics, the answer of the world will be, that mathematics has given mankind a metrical and computatory art essential to the effective conduct of daily life, that mathematics admits of countless applications in engineering and the natural sciences, and finally that mathematics is a most excellent instrumentality for giving mental discipline ... [A mathematician will add] that mathematics is the exact science, the science of exact thought or of rigorous thinking. ~ Cassius Jackson Keyser

What we have seen with Islamist extremism, whether it is in Mali or Somalia or Afghanistan, is that the disease is not necessarily the individual country. The disease is the Islamist extremism, and that's what we have to fight; that's the narrative that we have to beat. ~ David Cameron

The state is a voluntary association of individuals designed to serve their individual interests. The state is not a faceless villain. The state is all of us. But freedom does not mean the freedom to commit violence. Violence includes direct and indirect action; i.e., it is just as violent to cause someone to starve to death by withholding aid as it is to shoot him, only sneakier. ~ Robert Peate

It's not that. I could manage over a hundred worlds like Verdia if so needed. No, the problem is that I have yet to discover why. Do you ever wonder about why, Alex?" "All the time, Omni," Alex replied, drifting off to sleep in his leather chair. The significance of a computer asking humanity's greatest question escaped him, "all the time." Chapter ~ M. Andrew Reid

Writing of a chance early meeting with Dylan Thomas in a London bar, Kay Boyle writes (1955, in the era of McCarthyism, 1947-1956):

Perhaps because he [Dylan Thomas was so often out of place among men, we take him now as symbol. Perhaps because we who write in America are in great difficulties now, we cherish Dylan Thomas as if he were our own ego, our own wild soul freed of the flesh. An American critic, writing of the American literary scene, points out that thinking Americans, in this period of our nation's development, are deeply troubled because "the demands for national security and for individual freedom" are in conflict. ~ Kay Boyle

There are cultural and societal prejudices that make it hard for us to write. It has been my experience that for some men, the struggle to write involves the prejudice that it is not "manly" to reveal the inner life, the secrets of the heart and of the imagination. For many women, the struggle to write is at base a struggle against the idea that women's lives are not of interest as literature. I have a friend whose husband once said after her first book had been published, "You sit there writing as if your life had some significance. ~ Pat Schneider

I'm the eldest of six kids, and I think that may have some significance. I think there's some correlation between maybe being the eldest and wanting to blaze a trail. I think that probably helps in some way. ~ Harry West

Every individual is a potential gold buyer, although he may not need the gold. It may be added to the store of personal wealth, and passed from generation to generation as an object of family wealth. There is no other economic good as marketable as gold. ~ Hans F. Sennholz

She held the paper in her hand for a long time, trying to follow the reasoning by which that thin ragged boy had become in the eyes of a reporter a 'burly Negro.' And she decided that it all depended on where you sat how these things looked. If you looked at them from inside the framework of a fat weekly salary, and you thought of colored people as naturally criminal, then you didn't really see what any Negro looked like. You couldn't because the Negro was never an individual. He was a threat, or an animal, or a curse, or a blight, or a joke. ~ Ann Petry

I care more about making sure the story is correct and the characters are behaving in character than I do about the individual jokes. ~ Michael Schur

The rationale for loving others is the recognition of the simple fact that every living being has the same right to and the same desire for happiness, and not suffering, and the consideration that you as one individual are one life unit as compared with the mulititude of others in their ceaseless quest for happiness. ~ Dalai Lama

The call of Jesus teaches us that our relation to the world has been built on an illusion. All the time we thought was had enjoyed a direct relation with men and things. This is what had hindered us from faith and obedience. Now we learn that in the most intimate relationships of life, in our kinship with father and mother, brothers and sisters, in married love, and in our duty to the community, direct relationships are impossible. Since the coming of Christ, his followers have no more immediate realities of their own, not in their family relationships nor in the ties with their nation nor in the relationships formed in the process of living. Between father and son, husband and wife, the individual and the nation, stands Christ the Mediator, whether they are able to recognize him or not. We cannot establish direct contact outside ourselves except through him, through his word, and through our following of him. To think otherwise is to deceive ourselves. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays, you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Alternatively, the person may be reacting normally to an intolerable situation, but misguided professionals incorrectly focus on changing the individual rather than modifying the person's situation or environment. ~ F. Richard Olenchak

We can unfortunately not indefinitely extend the sphere of common action and still leave the individual free in his own sphere. Once the communal sector, in which the state controls all the means, exceeds a certain proportion of the whole, the effects of its actions dominate the whole system. Although the state controls directly the use of only a large part of the available resources, the effects of its decisions on the remaining part of the economic system become so great that indirectly it controls almost everything. ~ Friedrich Hayek

Time in West Africa is not a linear measurement. It can be free-flowing or motionless, but it is never a constant. Time in Africa is personalized, divided and defined on an individual basis. ~ Sarah Erdman

That's what I so admired about Johnny Cash and June Carter. Their music wasn't a big influence on me. It was their character, their individual styles, what they were like as people. They weren't afraid to stick out. ~ Shelby Lynne

Enlightenment means literally aligning to the Energy of my Source. And genius is only about focusing. Law of Attraction takes care of everything else. Physical humans often want to make enlightenment about finding some process and moving through the process that has been pre-described. But true enlightenment is moving to the rhythm of the internal inspiration that is coming in response to the individual desire. Enlightenment is about allowing my Connection to the Source that is me for the fulfillment of the things that I have individually defined here in my time-space-reality. ~ Esther Hicks

Goethe (I don't know why, but Goethe somehow always speaks up in my critical moments) said: "Man must experience his own destiny" - not a factual destiny forced on him by History, but the nonrecurrent, his very own. Perhaps this was possible a hundred years ago. At the time of the French Revolution and also of the Napoleonic Wars, an individual still had the means of turning against the collective destiny adroitly, cunningly. He could hide or build emergency dams hastily in his soul. And a hundred years ago when someone mounted the scaffold or fell on the battlefield, he knew that what was then being consummated personally was his destiny. But today? There is no longer a "personal destiny;" there are only statistical probabilities. One cannot feel it to be personal destiny when an atom bomb explodes or when a dictatorship enunciates an outmoded, stupid judgment on a society. This is why I must go somewhere from this place where, perhaps, it will be possible for me to live my own destiny for a time. Because here I have already become only a piece of data in a category. ~ Sandor Marai

And Pierre's soul was dimly but joyfully filled not by the story itself but by its mysterious significance: by the rapturous joy that lit up Karataev's face as he told it, and the mystic significance of that joy. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Self-management has several components that come together to bring about perceivable change in the personality of an individual. ~ Prem Jagyasi

I believe that God has a plan and purpose not only for the human race, but for my individual life. ~ Anne Graham Lotz

Looking at the turmoil of life from this standpoint we find all occupied with its want and misery, exerting all their strength in order to satisfy its endless needs and avert manifold suffering, without, however, daring to expect anything else in return than merely the preservation of this tormented individual existence for a short span of time. And yet, amid all this turmoil we see a pair of lovers exchanging longing glances - yet why so secretly, timidly, and stealthily? Because these lovers are traitors secretly striving to perpetuate all this misery and turmoil that otherwise would come to a timely end. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Every great example of punishment has in it some injustice, but the suffering individual is compensated by the public good. ~ Tacitus

Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression "individual rights"? is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today's intellectual chaos). But the expression "collective rights"? is a contradiction in terms. ~ Ayn Rand

The book is a body and your mind will mold to its individual curves much in the way it will to any other lover-- at least, until it buckles beyond us. ~ Yxta Maya Murray

Individuals learn faster than institutions and it is always the dinosaur's brain that is the last to get the new messages. ~ Hazel Henderson