And beware those who only take instructions from theretofore they have failed completely to live their own lives.

— Charles Bukowski

And so, what of it all? What of me and my passions and personas, my great loves and failures of love, my writing, my politics? What of the clanging opinions, the endless queries as to the whys and wherefores of how I chose to conduct myself? In the end, there is but one answer to every question, whether it is spit at me or made as gentlest inquiry: I was I.

— Elizabeth Berg

And why, she began to ask, did she rage against individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was embittered laughter.

— Sinclair Lewis

An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented. I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. Furthermore, I am someone in that room; I am—

— Samuel R. Delany

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

An original is worth more than a copy.

— Suzy Kassem

Anybody can learn to think, or believe, or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel... the moment you feel, you're nobody ― but-yourself ― in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else ― means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

— E.E. Cummings

Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again.

— Criss Jami

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

— Oscar Wilde

A peaceful feeling: A happy harmony or symphony of all of our character pieces working in powerful unison” from Cinderella In Focus

— H.L. Balcomb