Eccentricity Quotes - Page 2

• You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Clouds, Eccentric, Blame

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Familiar Letters (Annotated Edition)”, p.39, Jazzybee Verlag

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• ...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.

  Dave Hickey

  Fun, Powerful, Issues

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• To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity.

  Steven Brust

  Fashion, Understanding, Eccentric

  Steven Brust (2003). “The Paths of the Dead: Book One of the Viscount of Adrilankha”, p.98, Macmillan

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• My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.

  Martin Short

  Mother, Symphony, Masters

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• Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.

  Rose Macaulay

  Children, Thinking, Nuts

  Rose Macaulay (1926). “A Casual Commentary”

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• So long as a man rides his hobbyhorse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him - pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?

  Laurence Sterne

  Peace, Kings, Men

  'Tristram Shandy' (1759-67) bk. 1, ch. 7

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• The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

  H. L. Mencken

  Inspirational, Funny, Underdog

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.622, Vintage

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• Eccentricity: strength of character doubling back on itself.

  Mason Cooley

  Strength, Character, Strength Of Character

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• I pay for what I call eccentricity and my will to evolve.

  Daveigh Chase

  Pay, Evolve

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.

  Honore de Balzac

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• Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

  Queen Elizabeth II

  Funny, Family, Queens

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• Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have.

  Oliver Sacks

  People, Accents

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• Eccentricity is what's sexy in people.

  Rachel Weisz

  Sexy, People

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Instead of exhibiting talent in the hope that the world would forgive their eccentricities, they have exhibited only their eccentricities, in the hope that the world would give them credit for talent.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Giving, Credit, World

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.24

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• Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.

  Randall Jarrell

  Country, Confused, Passion

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "The Development of Yeats's Sense of Reality" (p. 89), 1980.

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• Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.

  James Hillman

  Inspirational, Heart, Angel

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• The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we're born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.

  Christopher Fry

  Ambition, Animal, Frustration

  "Comedy". Vogue, January, 1951.

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• Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.

  James Thurber

  Children, Men, Ideas

  James Thurber (1996). “Writings and Drawings”, Library of America

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• Flowers construct the most charming geometries: circles like the sun, ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass seem a Lilliputian frieze of psychedelic silhouettes.

  Duane Michals

  Flower, Eye, Circles

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• Eccentricity, to be socially acceptable, had still to have at least four or five generations of inbreeding behind it.

  Osbert Lancaster

  Luck, Generations, Four

  Osbert Lancaster (1963). “All done from memory”, John Murray

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• Eccentricity may be diverting, Mama, but it is out of place in a wife: certainly in my wife!

  Georgette Heyer

  Wife, May, Mama

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• Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.

  Neil Simon

  Underestimate, Stimulation, Never Underestimate

  Neil Simon (1988). “Biloxi Blues”, Signet

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• We all try to be alike in our youth, and individual in our middle age ... although we sometimes mistake eccentricity for individuality.

  Alec-Tweedie

  Mistake, Individuality, Age

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• I felt it would to add a great deal to my legend for eccentricity.

  Roger Ebert

  Add, Legends, Deals

  Source: blankonblank.org

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• Eccentricity is developed monomania.

  Bayard Taylor

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