Mark Van Doren Quotes

Difference is of the essence of humanity.

In all known time there has never been a greater monster or miracle than the human being.

People are pretty much alike. It's only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities.

Everybody's like everybody else, and everybody's different from everybody else.

We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.

I think the only universal thing is one individual. If you talk about a country or a nation or a culture, it's so vague. I mean what is a nation? A nation is full of nice and bad and long and tall and short and thin people. It's not like everybody is the same.

The things that make me different are the things that make me.

If I had to express in one word what makes their [creative individuals'] personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."

No two men are absolutely alike, not even twins, yet there is much that is indispensably common to all mankind.

Everybody's born to be different, that's the one thing that makes us the same.

You have to be able to differentiate between the different areas of life. It shows that we're all separate people, we're all different, but we're all the same.

Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

I think a lot of snowflakes are alike...and I think a lot of people are alike too.

We are not the same. But we are, somehow, one.

Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside - some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me - we aren't so special, bro.

All cases are unique and very similar to others.

Every group has its idiosyncrasies, but at a certain point we all are human.

We all have so many different elements inside of us and we're not all one thing.

Human beings are glorious and preposterous characters.

People are still people no matter how you cut it.

We are all human beings with our own little knick-knacks and ways of doing things.

We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

It's interesting to see how we are all uniquely different.