C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Individuality
Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.
Individuals, not stations, ornament society.
Individuality is everywhere to be spared and respected as the root of everything good.
The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.
The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.
Thou art in the end what thou art. Put on wigs with millions of curls, set thy foot upon ell-high rocks. Thou ablest ever—what thou art.
God gave every man individuality of constitution, and a chance for achieving individuality of character. He puts special instruments into every man’s hands by which to make himself and achieve his mission.
Let us shun everything which might tend to efface the primitive lineaments of our individuality. Let us reflect that each one of us is a thought of God.
The epoch of individuality is concluded, and it is the duty of reformers to initiate the epoch of association. Collective man is omnipotent upon the earth he treads.
Not nations, not armies, have advanced the race; but here and there, in the course of ages, an individual has stood up and cast his shadow over the world.
Experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a state depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men; for the nation is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal improvement.
We move too much in platoons; we march by sections; we do not live in our vital individuality enough; we are slaves to fashion, in mind and in heart, if not to our passions and appetites.
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, monachism of the Hermit Anthony, the Reformation of Luther, Quakerism of Fox, Methodism of Wesley, abolition of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called “the height of Rome;” and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet.
Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon.
Human faculties are common, but that which converges these faculties into my identity separates me from every other man. That other man cannot think my thoughts, he cannot speak my words, he cannot do my works. He cannot have my sins, I cannot have his virtues.