Conformity Quotes - Page 18

• We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very badcompany, and was never invited to dinner.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Heaven, Care, Dinner

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.282, Penguin

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• I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Consistency, Dinner, Lasts

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.134, Harvard University Press

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• I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Air, Luxury, Pay

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.280, Harvard University Press

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• Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Hands, Firsts

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1838). “An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, 15 July, 1838”, p.27

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• If some of the greats had followed the traditional ways we would be missing so much fine art.

  Gene Black

  Art, Missing, Would Be

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• He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Travel, Track, Study

  Henry David Thoreau (1873). “The Maine Woods”, p.87

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• Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Healing, Emotional, Flow

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

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• Do you think I know what I'm doing? That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself? As much as a pen knows what it's writing, or the ball can guess where it's going next.

  Rumi

  Writing, Thinking, Balls

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• All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man's life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Rivers, Water

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.93, Xist Publishing

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• Art is not a mirror but an icon. It takes the chaos in which we live and shows us structure and pattern, not the structure of conformity which imprisons but the structure which liberates,
  sets us free to become growing, mature human beings.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Art, Mirrors, Icons

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “A Circle of Quiet”, p.74, Open Road Media

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• I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

  Oscar Wilde

  Hands, World, Terrible

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.162, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• One day you're there and then all of a sudden, there's less of you. And you wonder where that part went. If it's living somewhere outside of you. And you keep thinking maybe you'll get it back. And then you realize it's just gone.

  Elisabeth Moss

  Thinking, Mad Men, One Day

  "Mad Men: Meditations in an Emergency". TV Series, www.imdb.com. 2008.

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• But when I call for a hero, out comes my lazy old self; so I never know who I am, nor how many I am or will be. I'd love to be able to touch a bell and summon the real me, because if I really need myself, I mustn't disappear.

  Pablo Neruda

  Real, Hero, Self

  Pablo Neruda (2015). “The Poetry of Pablo Neruda”, p.475, Macmillan

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• Who do I belong to? How come I mortgaged my being till I don't belong to myself? How come I sold my blood? And who now owns my indecisions, my hands, my private pain, my pride?

  Pablo Neruda

  Pain, Pride, Blood

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• Our real journey in life is interior.

  Thomas Merton

  Real, Journey, Life Is

  Thomas Merton (1975). “The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton”, p.296, New Directions Publishing

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• The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.

  Robert Anthony

  Courage, Opposites, Bravery

  Robert Anthony (1986). “The Ultimate Secrets of Total Self-Confidence”, p.26, Penguin

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• After world war all we got was a lot of conformity, and conservatism and when I was in college at the university of Illinois the skirt lengths dropped instead of going up as they had during the roaring twenties and I knew that was a very bad sign, and it is symbolic and reflective of a very repressive time, and some of that was laid the feet of the cold war.

  Hugh Hefner

  War, College, Illinois

  "Interview With Hugh Hefner". nsarchive.gwu.edu.

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• When we receive with an entire and perfect resignation the afflictions which God sends us they become for us favors and benefits; because conformity to the will of God is a gain far superior to all temporal advantages.

  Vincent de Paul

  Religious, Perfect, Favors

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• Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Want, Losing Yourself, Easy

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• We come from the mentality, that rarely sees the horror in symmetry or the beauty in non-conformity

  Shane Koyczan

  Horror, Symmetry, Mentality

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• Remember: Bureaucracy elevates conformity ... Make that elevates 'fatal stupidity' to the status of religion.

  Frank Herbert

  Stupidity, Remember, Bureaucracy

  Frank Herbert (1987). “Chapterhouse: Dune”, p.96, Penguin

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• All moral obligation resolves itself into the obligation of conformity to the will of God.

  Charles Hodge

  Moral, Resolve, Obligation

  Charles Hodge (1874). “Soteriology, eschatology”, p.260

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• Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.

  Ivan Turgenev

  Blow, People, Understanding

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• Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Inalienable Rights, Moral

  Thomas Jefferson (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”, p.618

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• Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.

  Averroes

  Intellect, Objects

  Tahafut at-tahafut (ca. 1180)

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