Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.

I like the freedom America has. In Japan people tend to think too much about others' opinions and how to be like everybody else but to Americans it seems more important to be who you are and find your own way.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

What is the point of being on this Earth if you are going to be like everyone else?

If you don't have any individuality and you're happy just being one of the girls (or boys) be my guest. I'm not the fashion police. I won't fault you.

If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.

The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

I'm really not sure what people think or expect me to be, but I am surprised when people say, 'You're not supposed to be like that... ' I'm not exactly sure what 'that' is, so I choose to take it as a compliment.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

It isn't till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.

I tried to be different; I didn't want to be like everybody else.

I want to be sure I'm being myself. I don't want to follow something because someone's like 'do this, it's popular.'

I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?

I'd rather be a freak than a clone.

What does it mean to be yourself?” he asked. “If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you’re doing that already. If it means to act like you’re exempt from society’s influence, that’s the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to ‘be yourself’ is obviously nonsense. But our brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more comfortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe we have no idea how to behave.

If I start giving people what they like I'll turn into one of them and I don't want to be one of them I want to be one of me.

To be an individual is the hardest thing in the world, because nobody likes you to be an individual. Everybody wants to kill your individuality and to make a sheep out of you. Nobody wants you to be on your own.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.

There is truth in the high opinion that in so far as a man conforms, he ceases to exist.

We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

To be like other people is to be unlike ourselves.