An individual is a person or a specific object. Individuality (or selfhood) is the state or quality of being an individual; a person separate from other persons and possessing his or her own needs or goals.
From the 15th century and earlier, and also today within the fields of statistics and metaphysics, individual meant "indivisible", typically describing any numerically singular thing, but sometimes meaning "a person." (q.v. "The problem of proper names"). From the seventeenth century on, individual indicates separateness, as in individualism.
Read more about Individual: Empiricism, Hegel, Existentialism, Buddhism, Objectivism, Biology
Famous quotes containing the word individual:
“Life deceives everyone except the individual who doesn’t contemplate it, the individual who demands nothing from it, the individual who serenely accepts its few gifts and serenely makes the most of them.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)