Conventional Quotes - Page 17

• A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

  Augustine Birrell

  Reading, Book, Baths

  8 Copy quote

• I'm very proud of the Rome episode of 'No Reservations' because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You're never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Black And White, Rome, Television

  "Anthony Bourdain: Giving Up Cigarettes 'Has in No Way Improved My Life'". Interview with Lindsay Silberman, www.tvguide.com. April 8, 2012.

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

  Andre Breton

  Life, Feelings, Enlightenment

  12 Copy quote

• The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs.

  Jerry Brown

  Jobs, Stupid, Cutting

  "The Revolt Against Liberal Orthodoxy" by David Harsanyi, www.realclearpolitics.com. June 11, 2010.

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life?

  Paul Cezanne

  Earth, Succeed, Course Of Life

  4 Copy quote

• Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

  Noam Chomsky

  Hero, Doctrine, Neptune

  110 Copy quote

• Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

  Joseph Conrad

  Lonely, Memories, Loneliness

  Joseph Conrad (2016). “Under Western Eyes”, p.39, Joseph Conrad

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think the days of working with producers in the conventional sense are over for me.

  Billy Corgan

  Thinking, Producers

  4 Copy quote

• I guess they often cast me as the bad guy, because I'm not, er, conventional looking. I look sort of violent. I'm the odd one out, the outsider.

  Willem Dafoe

  Odd One, Guy, Looks

  16 Copy quote

• Whether rich or poor, a home is not a home unless the roots of love are ever striking deeper through the crust of the earthly and the conventional, into the very realities of being, not consciously always; seldom, perhaps; the simplicity of loving grows by living simply near nature and God.

  Lucy Larcom

  Home, Reality, Rich Or Poor

  4 Copy quote

• The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.

  Christopher Lasch

  Lying, Wings, Political

  8 Copy quote

• I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that's not the conventional definition of hiding.

  Hugh Laurie

  Mean, Thinking, People

  "Hugh Laurie Puts Blues In The House". "Weekend Edition Sunday" with Rachel Martin, www.npr.org. August 18, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We can't any longer have the conventional understanding of genetics which everybody peddles because it is increasingly obvious that epigenetics - actually things which influence the genome's function - are much more important than we realised.

  Robert Winston

  Understanding, Important, Influence

  9 Copy quote

• Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.

  Bob Woodward

  Wisdom, People, Stories

  24 Copy quote

• Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it's a doable proposition.

  Muhammad Yunus

  People, Banking, Reach Out

  "Create social business funds in each country and city". Interview with David Bornstein, www.thedailystar.net. April 19, 2013.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  America, People, Deserve Better

  "Come Hell or High Water". Book by Michael Eric Dyson, www.today.com. 2006.

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• Experimental architecture by its very nature is more prone to the depredations of time and natural elements than buildings made from conventional materials through traditional methods. Avant-garde architects often simply do not know how the products of their imagination will perform when implemented, especially if untested components are involved.

  Martin Filler

  Imagination, Avant Garde, Natural Elements

  4 Copy quote

• Conventional Indian cinema is about people falling in love. They sing, they dance.

  Anurag Kashyap

  Falling In Love, People, Cinema

  8 Copy quote

• If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.

  John McPhee

  Years, Forever, Way

  John McPhee (2000). “Annals of the Former World”, p.88, Macmillan

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking, Intelligent, Political Will

  13 Copy quote

• Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

  Eduardo Galeano

  Mean, Warrior, Reality

  Eduardo Galeano, Cedric Belfrage (1988). “Century of the Wind”, Pantheon Books

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.

  Thomas Hardy

  Stars, Real, Passion

  Jude the Obscure pt. 4, ch. 1 (1896)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We're up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington or proximity to the White House. But we know that real leadership is about candor and judgment and the ability to rally Americans from all walks of life around a common purpose, a higher purpose.

  Barack Obama

  Real, Thinking, Common Purpose

  South Carolina Democratic Primary Victory Speech, delivered 26 January 2008

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.

  Anne Sexton

  Children, Husband, White

  35 Copy quote

• Just as fossil fuels from conventional sources are finite and are becoming depleted, those from difficult sources will also run out. If we put all our energy and resources into continued fossil fuel extraction, we will have lost an opportunity to have invested in renewable energy.

  David Suzuki

  Running, Opportunity, Energy

  85 Copy quote