Impersonal Quotes

“To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“The difficulty is that, so long as unreason prevails, a solution of our troubles can only be reached by chance; for while reason, being impersonal, makes universal co-operation possible, unreason, since it represents private passions, makes strife inevitable. It is for this reason that rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species.”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

“Fame is an island, and right before the castaway, the getaway of being known without being known.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Impersonality is only reached by the practice of a form of attention which is rare in itself and impossible except in solitude; and not only physical but mental solitude. This is never achieved by a man who thinks of himself as a member of a collectivity, as part of something which says ‘We’.
Men as parts of a collectivity are debarred from even the lower forms of the impersonal. A group of human beings cannot even add two and two. Working out a sum takes place in a mind temporarily oblivious of the existence of any other minds.
Although the personal and the impersonal are opposed, there is a way from the one to the other. But there is no way from the collective to the impersonal. A collectivity must dissolve into separate persons before the impersonal can be reached. This is the only sense in which the person has more of the sacred than the collectivity.
The collectivity is not only alien to the sacred, but it deludes us with a false imitation of it.”
― Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest

“What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, its maladies, its manias - constipation, for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but because, on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal.”
― Milan Kundera, Identity

“It is hard to be impersonal in a cosmos that runs to personality.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“An 'a' is a very impersonal letter.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Perfection is impersonal. Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin. The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say ‘I’.
But the part of the soul which says ‘We’ is infinitely more dangerous still.”
― Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest