“I think that the poet is only an extension — or, if you prefer it, a concentration — of the ordinary man.”

Rejecting the romantic gap between poet and common reader · Essay, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Humanity
• Individuality
• Poets

“The individual is the strangest creation of man.”

Original: L'individu est la plus étrange création de l'homme. — A paradoxical observation on the tension between individuality and the society that produces it. · Mauvaises pensées et autres (French)

• Humanity
• Individuality
• Society

“I hated gardens where gaudy flowers were trained in rows but loved the wild things of change and circumstance.”

Prefers spontaneous natural beauty to imposed order · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Freedom
• Individuality
• Nature

“My purpose throughout has been to hold a mirror up to Nature, to give a faithful interpretation of thought and character, and to show my readers some of the ply of mind and habits of life that still prevail among Yorkshiremen whose individuality has not been blunted by convention.”

Dialect monologue as a true likeness, not a comic turn · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

• Character
• Honesty
• Individuality

“Each is girded by his own horizon and played upon by his own lights and shadows.”

A striking image of how differently individual lives are experienced · Letter to Phineas Barnes

• Experience
• Individuality
• Understanding

“I felt and still feel that one must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself.”

Turning from mass categories toward individual moral salvage · Essay, Claude McKay Describes His Own Life, Pearson's Magazine, 1918

• Individuality
• Morality
• Soul

“Individual initiative has been paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church.”

A characteristic attack on institutional authority and its effect on personal freedom. · Lecture, Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages, 1907

• Church
• Freedom
• Individuality

“There were men who would not be disciples... to not be a disciple meant to be either an abrupt and emphatic individuality or nothing.”

Reflecting on the fierce independence required of an artist standing outside established movements · Biography, James Joyce: His First Forty Years

• Art
• Independence
• Individuality

“Genius is always individual.”

Defending individuality as the source of intellectual and social advancement · Letter to Isa Blagden, c. 1850

• Individuality
• Originality
• Society

“Every man gives the answer which seems right in his own eyes.”

Recognising the stubborn subjectivity behind supposedly objective judgements · Introductory Lecture, University College London, 1892

• Individuality
• Truth
• Understanding

“every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike.”

Celebrating Shakespeare's ability to create distinct human personalities · Preface to Shakespeare, 1725

• Humanity
• Individuality
• Literature

“Though I seem to have been driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.”

Joyce distinguishes personal conviction from the religious and national authorities around him. · Letter to Augusta Gregory, November 1902

• Belief
• Faith
• Individuality

“To band together, unite or form groups in order to write verse or produce any kind of art is absurd, disagreeable and dangerous to the development of personality.”

Original: Agregarse, unirse, agruparse para escribir versos o producir cualquier género de arte es absurdo, antipático y peligroso para el desarrollo de la personalidad. — Warning that artistic movements can suppress individual creative identity · Article, Los jóvenes del Ultra, 1919 (Spanish)

• Art
• Freedom
• Individuality

“Art is not a matter of rhetoric, nor even of literature, but of personality.”

Original: El arte no es cosa de retórica ni aun de literatura, sino de personalidad. — Locating the essential source of art in the individual creator · Lecture, Los poetas de hoy (Spanish)

• Art
• Creativity
• Individuality

“Art is something universal, or, if you prefer, individual, which in the end is the best form of universality.”

Original: El arte es cosa universal o si queréis individual, que al cabo es la mejor forma de universalidad. — Suggesting that genuine individuality is itself a path towards universality · Article, El modernismo y la ropa vieja, 1901 (Spanish)

• Art
• Humanity
• Individuality

“Studio visits are valuable because they are the only way to get at a man's individuality.”

Preferring the person behind the picture · Art criticism essays

• Artists
• Criticism
• Individuality

“As to how I write a story—there is no one way. Each one of my tales has a different history.”

Rejecting the idea that creative work must follow a single fixed method · Essay, Notes on Writing Weird Fiction

• Creativity
• Individuality
• Writing

“A survey of the work of Negro poets will show that the individual diversifying ego transcends the synthesizing hue.”

Personality, not colour, is what finally sorts one poet from another · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

• Identity
• Individuality
• Poetry

“To be 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.”

On the value of selfhood and resistance to conformity · Letter (commonly attributed)

• Courage
• Individuality
• Self

“You have something to say. Something of your very own. Try to say it. Don't be ashamed of any real thought or feeling you have. Don't undervalue it. Don't let the fear of others prevent you from saying it.”

A charge to trust an unrepeatable personal voice · Teaching books, commonly cited

• Courage
• Individuality
• Writing

“Different men have different aptitudes, and this aptitude happens to be uncommon.”

Recognising genuine differences in people's capacity for literary judgement · Introductory Lecture, University College London, 1892

• Criticism
• Individuality
• Skill

“Nothing is so commonplace as to wish to be remarkable.”

A pointed observation on the paradox of seeking distinction and the ordinary human desire to stand out · Essay, Shelley

• Ambition
• Individuality
• Vanity

“The individual triumphs when the Will-to-live is capable of sublimation.”

Presenting personal development as the transformation of instinctive energy into higher purposes. · A Defence of Idealism

• Growth
• Individuality
• Will

“The world demands a general education from us now; we therefore need not concern ourselves further with that. We must make the particular our own.”

Original: Eine allgemeine Ausbildung dringt uns jetzt die Welt ohnehin auf; wir brauchen uns deshalb darum nicht weiter zu bemühen, das Besondere müssen wir uns zueignen. — Goethe distinguishes broad education from the deeper task of developing individual knowledge and expertise. · Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (German)

• Education
• Individuality
• Learning