We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis.
It's not the 'nice' guy who brings about real social change. 'Nice' guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the 'bad' guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.
May the Heart of Jesus Christ be our school! Let us make our abode there. Let us study its movements and attempt to conform ours to them. Yes, O Divine Jesus, I want to live there.
I had a lot of anger against the way things 'should be done' - conforming to social norms, ticking boxes to gain acceptance. Frustration at the pointlessness and predictability of smalltalk. Oh and a lot of anger about tea, which the British seem to use to avoid actually saying anything.
I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.
The greatest achievement is selflessness. The greatest worth is self-mastery. The greatest quality is seeking to serve others. The greatest precept is continual awareness. The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything. The greatest action is not conforming with the worlds ways. The greatest magic is transmuting the passions. The greatest generosity is non-attachment. The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind. The greatest patience is humility. The greatest effort is not concerned with results. The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go. The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.
Real men don't conform to the beliefs of others, even when society has concluded on what is good and true, but maintain the integrity of their own mind.
Bitterness is the outcome of a wrong mental movement - the attempt to force external events to conform to internal fantasy. The cure is to see fantasy as fantasy, which will reveal it as neither necessary nor rewarding.
In literature as in life, to conform to anything is to knuckle under to your inferiors.
If you're in favour of any policy - reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever - if you're at least minimally moral, it's because you think it's somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.
I like playing the social convention. If you're in a period drama, there's always something dancing underneath the surface as a human - but then you always have to conform to the social conventions around you, and those two things get to be juxtaposed against each other. You're being human, but you're trapped within the social convention of the time.
I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.
[T]he great American statesman devotes his energy, ability, and wisdom to conforming himself and this people to the moral principles that gave this nation birth, are older than anything else in the country's soul, and yet retain the power to make us young again with the vigor of virtue and the zeal for justice.
I hate to see great works of literature ghettoized, whereas others that conform to the rules, conventions, and procedures of the genre we call literary fiction get accorded greater esteem and privilege. I also have a problem with how books are marketed, with certain cover designs and typefaces. They're often stamped with an identity that has nothing to do with their effect on the reader.
If you're going to say you're Catholic, you inform your conscience so that you're activities will conform to what God is telling us through the Church. If God is telling you something outside of that, well, the Church will look at that and say: we think it is true or we don't think it is true. The Church might say: that might be true for you but it has no public normative value.
Don't rebel against the mainstream only to conform to the underground.
If one has to conform to a certain taste, he/she might lose his/her own individuality and imagination. But if you don't really care about winning competitions and think of them as chances to learn from the experience, they would become good ways to learn about others and yourself. Competitions are also stages where one becomes known to the public.
Civility, which is a disposition to accommodate and oblige others, is essentially the same in every country; but good breeding, asit is called, which is the manner of exerting that disposition, is different in almost every country, and merely local; and every man of sense imitates and conforms to that local good breeding of the place which he is at.
Audiences, whether they're seeing a film or a reading or whatever it is, a concert, they decide very quickly what kind of show it is, and then they judge it. They judge the rest of the thing by whether it conforms to their rules for what a good symphony orchestra would be.
When we get to the point, as we one day will, that both sides know that in any outbreak of general hostilities, regardless of the element of surprise, destruction will be both reciprocal and complete, possibly we will have sense enough to meet at the conference table with the understanding that the era of armaments has ended and the human race must conform its actions to this truth or die.
I've never believed it's really so important that you conform to the ways of the system in order to beat the system. I think that the system follows a great deal.
Legal reform organizations are usually trying to portray their constituents as "hard workers," as "not criminals," as citizens, as part of normative family arrangements, and as conforming to white norms as much as possible. When these strategies are used, the most dangerous conditions and the people who are most vulnerable cannot be discussed or addressed.
I think there's an unnatural amount of social pressure on women, particularly mothers, to conform to certain standards of behavior, particularly in regard to our children.
Men are recognizing that they have been forced to conform to a very narrow and rather two-dimensional picture of maleness and manhood that they have never had the freedom to question.
The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by [high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality], while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European standards.
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