Quotes About Independent Life

“The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.”

— Wassily Kandinsky

“Teenage girls today need strong, positive role models that can show them how to be independent thinkers and confident decision-makers. Dana is proud and self-confident, which is good, but she does not always make wise decisions. Rather than make her a super woman, I balanced her with difficult situations that could have been handled better. Her strength, however, shines through. This way, a young woman can read the book, discuss Dana's actions, and reflect on the decision-making in her own life.”

— Sharon M. Draper

“Book your life choices in advance the same way you would book flights, car rentals, hotels, and excursions. Figure out early on in your career whether you intend to be financially independent or marry a rich man, join the ranks of the professional elite or be the stay-at- home type, postpone having children or find part-time employment. Then fasten your seat belt and sit tight as you watch your trajectory veer off course.”

— Veronique Vienne

“A person raised in a healthy family is equipped to live a confident and independent life; someone from an unhealthy family is filled with fear and self-doubt. He has difficulty with the prospect of life without someone else. The devaluing messages of control and manipulation create dependency so those who most need to leave their family of origin are the least equipped to do so.”

— Christina Enevoldsen

“She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.”

— Mary McCarthy

“Bushido as an independent code of ethics may vanish, but its power will not perish from the earth; its schools of martial prowess or civic honor may be demolished, but its light and its glory will long survive their ruins. Like its symbolic flower, after it is blown to the four winds, it will still bless mankind with the perfume with which it will enrich life.”

— Inazo Nitobe

“What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life.”

— Ayn Rand

“In Isaac Newton's lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England's most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea-based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. "This may not be what George Washington looked like then," a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "but this is what he looks like now." Exactly.”

— James Gleick

“Wishing for things could sometimes call them forth. Wishing to study could incite a desire to do so, stimulate an interest. Reading about a region could pique interest in it, make you want to travel there and experience it. But passion could not be piped forth, could not be lured from its den by any known device or trick. It seemed to have a stubborn, independent life of its own, slumbering when it would be convenient for it to dance, springing forth when there was no reason for it, nowhere for it to spend itself.”

— Margaret George

“The principle of equality, which makes men independent of each other, gives them a habit and a taste for following, in their private actions, no other guide but their own will. This complete independence, which they constantly enjoy towards their equals and in the intercourse of private life, tends to make them look upon all authority with a jealous eye, and speedily suggests to them the notion and the love of political freedom. Men living at such times have a natural bias to free institutions. Take any one of them at a venture, and search if you can his most deep-seated instincts; and you will find that, of all governments, he will soonest conceive and most highly value that government whose head he has himself elected, and whose administration he may control.”

— Alexis De Tocqueville

“And finally, at age seventy, having distinguished himself as a brilliant Secretary of State, an independent President and an eloquent member of Congress, he was to record somberly that his "whole life has been a succession of disappointments. I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success in anything that I ever undertook." Yet”

— John F. Kennedy

“I've known Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and they're two of the most independent people I've ever known in my life, and the thought we could somehow bend their views I find really beyond my capacity to believe.”

— Peter George Peterson

“Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, argued in the daily beast that the power of the single voter is destined to fade, since single people "Have no heirs," while their religious, conservative, counterparts will repopulate the nation with children who will replicate their parents politics, ensuring that "conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail." Kotkin's error, of course, is both in assuming that unmarried people do not reproduce
in fact, they are doing so in ever greater numbers
but also in failing to consider whence the gravitation away from married norms derived. A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from the clamshell: it was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequalities of religious, conservative, social practice.”

— Rebecca Traister

“I deliberately went to boarding school. It was my choice. My mum was abroad and I wanted to wean myself off being dependent. It was a very important time for me to be able to create my own individual, independent life; just as a way of growing up.”

— Alice Englert

“A YEAR OR SO AGO I READ AN ARTICLE THAT SAID in the next five years we will become a conglomerate of the people we hang out with. The article went so far as to say relationships were a greater predictor of who we will become than exercise, diet, or media consumption. And if you think about it, the idea makes sense. As much as we are independent beings, contained in our own skin, the ideas and experiences we exchange with others grow into us like vines and reveal themselves in our mannerisms and language and outlook on life. If you want to make a sad person happy, start by planting them in a community of optimists.”

— Donald Miller

“Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.”

— Bertrand Russell

“In the end, does it really matter if newspapers physically disappear? Probably not: the world is always changing. But does it matter if organisations independent enough and rich enough to employ journalists to do their job disappear? Yes, that matters hugely; it affects the whole of life and society.”

— Andrew Marr

“The invisible life energy of the universe is ceaselessly being supplied to you through your breathing and your meridian points. When you truly realize that your life force is not maintained by your own independent power, but by the greater energy at large, your small, finite self gains the power to draw in that energy.”

— Ilchi Lee

“Swapping out the nine-to-five for a more agile, independent working life brings with it one other huge benefit - a channel for self-actualization.”

— Leah Busque

“Maybe it's working because I'm an author, and maybe it's working because Karen works like life depends on this bookstore, or because we have a particularly brilliant staff, or because Nashville is a city that is particularly sympathetic to all things independent. Maybe we just got lucky. But my luck has made me believe that changing the course of the corporate world is possible. Amazon doesn't get to make all the decisions; the people can make them by how and where they spend their money. If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore. If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read the book. This is how we change the world: we grab hold of it. We change ourselves.”

— Ann Patchett

“It's a fact ... that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market' ... Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”

— Michel Houellebecq

“Risk" does not exist "out there," independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of "risk" to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as "real risk" or "objective risk.”

— Daniel Kahneman

“I vicariously lived the life of an independent producer from the time I was 4 years old.”

— Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.

“Independent contractors - a rapidly growing piece of the workforce - can often achieve the best quality of life. They can choose from where they work, whom they work for and for how long.”

— Maynard Webb

“And so my father changed his name to William Pretty and here he grew up and led an independent life. And if it was not happy, he didn't know it.”

— Annie Proulx

“I wanted to be an independent woman, a woman who could pay for her bills, a woman who could run her own life - and I became that woman.”

— Diane Von Furstenberg

“If the incarceration experience doesn't break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears. You begin to realize that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambition and that it can end any day at any time. So why worry? You learn that just like on the street, there is life in prison, and random people get there based on the jeopardy of the system. The prisons are filled by people who crossed the law, as well as by those who were incidentally and circumstantially picked and crushed by somebody else's agenda. On the other hand, as a vivid benefit, you become very much independent of material property and learn to appreciate very simple pleasures in life such as the sunlight and morning breeze.”

— Michael Lewis

“I have spent a great deal of my life during the past thirty-five years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by the way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.”

— Edward W. Said

“At the very name of another country, my heart would go out to it, and at the sight of a foreigner in the streets, I would fall to weaving a network of dreams,-the mountains, the glens, and the forests of his distant home, with his cottage in its setting, and the free and independent life of far-away wilds.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“And so it is true in this sense that there is essentially but one religion, the religion of the living God. For to live in the conscious realisation of the fact that God lives in us, is indeed the life of our life, and that in ourselves we have no independent life, and hence no power, is the one great fact of all true religion, even as it is the one great fact of human life. Religion, therefore, at its purest, and life at its truest, are essentially and necessarily one and the same.”

— Ralph Waldo Trine

“I believe employers should be aware that employees who earn under $10 an hour cannot lead an independent life. But I do not believe that government should dictate wages. We have seen this fail in Socialist and Communist countries. It will do irreparable harm.”

— Richard Riordan

“The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight-previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life-has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun.”

— Robert Ballard

“No human reality would therefore have been engendered if, thanks to a propensity that can be considered
fortunate for Hegel's system, there had not existed, from the beginning of time, two kinds of
consciousness, one of which has not the courage to renounce life and is therefore willing to recognize the
other kind of consciousness without being recognized itself in return. It consents, in short, to being
considered as an object. This type of consciousness, which, to preserve its animal existence, renounces
independent life, is the consciousness of a slave. The type of consciousness which by being recognized
achieves independence is that of the master. They are distinguished one from the other at the moment
when they clash and when one submits to the other. The dilemma at this stage is not to be free or to die,
but to kill or to enslave. This dilemma will resound throughout the course of history, though at this
moment its absurdity has not yet been resolved.”

— Albert Camus

“There is no point in trying to remember your dreams ... There is only the unspeakable joy of eavesdropping on your spirit, catching tiny glimpses of its independent life, resting for a moment in its wisdom, puzzling, laughing sometimes, over what it's up to, what it makes of you.”

— Marsha Norman

“The frequent employment of one's will power masters all organs of movement and trains them to perform feats which otherwise would have been difficult,painful and even impossible. The man becomes independent and self-reliant; he will never be a coward,and, when real danger threatens,he is the one who is looked up to by others. The knowledge of one's strength entails a real mastery over oneself; it breeds energy and courage,helps one over the most difficult tasks of life, and procures contentment and true enjoyment of living.”

— George Hackenschmidt

“Teen girls are figuring out what they want out of life and who they want to be. They are becoming more and more independent, and are starting to make decisions that will affect them now and into the future. Combine this new responsibility with all the stress and pressures in their lives and the result, unfortunately, can be substance abuse.”

— Atoosa Rubenstein

“If necessary, I cry. I pray. I rest. I'm fortunate to have quite a few strong, independent, loving, and unbiased women in my life that I can talk things through with.”

— Grace Gealey

“A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the subject it may represent.”

— Henry Moore

“The result of my hard work is that I'm financially independent, I have an amazing life, and I can do whatever I want. I don't have to answer to anybody.”

— Tucker Max

“The physical life of an individual person is limited, but the life of the masses united as an independent social-political organism is immortal ... Only when an individual becomes a member of this community can he acquire the immortal social-political life.”

— Kim Jong Il

“The experience that I had in Paris I could never have ever again in my life. This is when I grew up as a young man. I was independent. There was no one there to talk to; I didn't even want to talk to anyone. I started to write about what I was experiencing, and I had no choice, so I was never scared.”

— Benjamin Clementine

“Any contemporary political re-statement of liberal and socialist goals must include as central the idea of a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies, its history and thus for their own life fates.”

— C. Wright Mills

“I do not believe the promises of the Declaration of Independence are just for the strong, the independent, the healthy. They are for everyone-including unborn children. We are a society with enough compassion and wealth and love to care for both mothers and their children, to seek the promise and potential in every life.”

— George W. Bush

“In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.”

— Wassily Kandinsky

“Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms”

— Lewis Thomas

“The fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive.”

— Guy Maddin

“It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from a more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another-the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter”

— William S. Burroughs

“The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for free and independent life: the mechanism that makes it possible is that which assured the maintenance, with the internal environment, of all the conditions necessary for the life of the elements.”

— Claude Bernard

“At the end of the day, it's all one version of telling a story. I treated this as if it was a two million dollar independent film. I did a lot more physical work than I'd probably have to do for a two million dollar independent film with four months of training and stuff. But as far as the character's psychology or emotional life goes, I treat it just the same.”

— Colin Farrell

“The soul of me is very selfish. I have gone my way after a fashion that made me the center of the plan. And you who are so individual, who are so independent a spirit, whose soul is also a kingdom, have been so loyal, so forgiving, so self-sacrificing in your willingness to live my life. Nothing but love cold have accomplished so wonderful a thing.”

— Woodrow Wilson