Eccentricity Quotes - Page 5

• I look on the opposite sex with something like the admiration with which I regard the starry sky on a frosty December night. I admire the beauty of the Creator's workmanship, I am charmed with the wild but graceful eccentricity of the motions, and then I wish both of them goodnight.

  Robert Burns

  Sex, Night, Opposites

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• Our industry is full of all sorts of eccentricities and one of them is owning property.

  Cliff Richard

  Property, Industry

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• Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.

  Teju Cole

  Mean, Self, Stories

  Teju Cole (2011). “Open City”, p.243, Faber & Faber

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• I love and admire everyone who is different. I love that. The 'jet set' is banal. 'Good taste' is banal. Eccentricity is chic. Good taste paralyzes. But punk or street fashion or a tattoo-covered body, that is interesting to me, and that I love. I didn't go to fashion school. I learned from watching couture shows on TV and reading magazines. That made me dream.

  Jean Paul Gaultier

  Tattoo, Dream, Fashion

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• It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.

  Thomas Sowell

  Clever, Mean, Common Sense

  Thomas Sowell (2013). “Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays”, p.328, Hoover Press

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• Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.

  Laura Riding

  Writing, Mean, Practice

  "A Survey of Modernist Poetry". Book by Laura Riding, 1927.

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• Develop your eccentricities early, and no one will think you're going senile later in life

  David Ogilvy

  Thinking, Later In Life, Senile

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• Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.

  John Dewey

  Mediocrity, Uniforms, Originality

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education”, p.176, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

  George Orwell

  Thinking, Animal, Law

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.305, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential - we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today - well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?

  Edmund White

  Memories, Thinking, Roots

  "A Boy's Own Story". Book by Edmund White, E.P. Dutton, Chapter Four, p. 92, 1982.

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• A philosopher ... is not fairly judged by his eccentricities, nor by the frailties to which he is liable; still less should his philosophy as a whole fall into ill-repute because of those among its devotees who have stumbled into wells, or who aimlessly pass their lives in whetting their faculties and then neglecting to use them.

  John Grier Hibben

  Philosophy, Fall, Use

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• Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.

  Joseph McCabe

  Religious, Struggle, Past

  "The Human Origin of Morals". Book by Joseph McCabe, 1926.

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• [Scottish songs] are, I own, frequently wild, & unreduceable to the more modern rules; but on that very eccentricity, perhaps, depends a great part of their effect.

  Robert Burns

  Song, Scottish, Modern

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• BBC Radio is not so much an art or industry as it is a way of life . . . a mirror that reflects . . . the eccentricities, the looniness that make Britons slightly different from other humans.

  Morley Safer

  Art, Mirrors, Radio

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• I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups - (a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Groups, Three, Taste

  Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner (7 March 1920), in "Selected Letters I, 1911-1924" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 110), 1964.

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• It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Diversity, Arrogance, Culture

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• We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the prices is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Attitude, Heart, Order

  "West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 641-42". 1943.

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• I’m one of those very lucky people who absolutely love what they do for a living. There is no career better suited to my eccentricities, strengths, and passions than that of a children’s book author.

  Mary Pope Osborne

  Children, Book, Passion

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• Society doesn't need that everybody is behaving in the full normal way... like people in a Buddhist monastery... But eccentricity may also connect with the irrational.

  John Muir

  Buddhist, People, Needs

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