'an original person'

"You tell me I am not an original person. Observe, dear prince, that nothing offends a man of our day and our race more than to tell him that he is not original, that he is weak-willed, has no particular talents and is an ordinary person. You haven't even given me credit for being a first-rate scoundrel, and you know I was ready to annihilate you for it just now. You offended me more than Epanchin, who, without discussion, without having tried to tempt me, in the simplicity of his heart, note that, believes me capable of selling my wife. That has enraged me for a long time, and I want money. When I have money, I shall become a highly original man. What's most low and hateful about money is that even talent can be bought with it, and will be, till the end of the world."

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1869) (trans. Garnett, 1913)

Freedom means that one isn't needed anywhere.

Carl shook his head mournfully. "Freedom so often means that one is n't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)

'how easily and insensibly we ... make a beaten path for ourselves'

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten path for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

'And then—the glory—'

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

What a Real Living Human Being is Made Of

Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men--each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature--are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.

--Hermann Hesse, Demian (1925)

'the subtle enmity of fame'

Young man anywhere, in whom something stirs that makes you shiver, profit by the fact that no one knows you. And if they contradict you who hold you of no account, and if they give you up entirely whom you frequent, and if they would extirpate you because of your precious thoughts—what is this obvious danger, which holds you concentrated within yourself, against the subtle enmity of fame, later, which renders you innocuous by scattering you?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) (trans. M.D. Herter Norton 1949)

'stand guard over the solitude of the other'

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter dated Feb. 12, 1902, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: Volume 1, 1892–1910 (trans. Greene & Norton 1945)

'planning to be such an important finger'

"Well," Amory considered, "I'm not sure that the war itself had any great effect on you or me—but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation."

Tom looked up in surprise.

"Yes it did," insisted Amory. "I'm not sure it didn't kill it out of the whole world. Oh Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader—and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn't be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—"

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

'retain in all seasons a temperature of thine own'

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. 

But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick ch. 68 (1851)

But something is wrong.

But what are we to make of a man who is committed in the most radical sense to the proposition that truth is attainable by science and that emotional gratification is attainable by interacting with one's environment and at the highest level by the enjoyment of art? It seems that everything is settled for him. But something is wrong. He has settled everything except what it is to live as an individual. He still has to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. Such a man is something like the young man Kierkegaard described who was given the task of keeping busy all day and finished the task at noon. What does this man do with the rest of the day?
the rest of his life?

--Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land (1991)