Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes

What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

Nobody can tell you what to do. No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them. Every second defines you. Be who you are, not who anyone else is, or who anyone else wants you to be.

I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.

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.

I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?' " 'The way I want it?' " 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?' " 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.' " 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.' " 'Mess it up how?' " 'Forgot it.' " 'Forgot?' " 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else.

I don't want people to be inspired or offended by what I do. If you determine your behavior by what [other people] want, you're screwed.

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.

Those who fear that we are losing our individualism couldn't be more wrong: Americans have never been more free to create and recreate themselves.

I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy.

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.

I wouldn't push my kids to do anything. I want them to be happy, healthy, and I want them to be who they want to be, you know?

Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.

I wanted to use my possibility to be an individual, and I suppose I have, no?

I love to reinvent myself, and that's because I am a very free person. I do what I feel, and I love who I am.

I want to be defined by my own essence.

My life choices are not supposed to be the gateway to somebody else's. That's my journey.

I got to the point where I was fed up with so many people telling me how and who I was supposed to be.

I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. I'm going to figure out what that is.

I always had that yearning, that hunger, to one day be independent and be my own person and build my own world. The most fulfilling thing is to live a life where you have freedom.

Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.

Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person. And to retain this right, you will have to be willing to take the social or external risks involved in ignoring pressures to do things the way others say they should be done

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

… not to destroy individualism but to protect it