Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.
Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society – nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of a certain intellectual supremacy – the mass never frees itself.[Es gelingt nur wenig Individuen, die Mythologie in der Epoche eines gewissen intellektuellen Übermutes abzustreifen, die Masse befreit sich nie.]
Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
It is only to the individual that a soul is given.
It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.
In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
Imitation is a double murder; for it deprives both copy and original of their primitive existence.[L’imitation est une espèce de mort, puisqu’elle dépouille chacun de son existence naturelle.]
If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren; and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass that the Guest leaves.
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts.
