Conventional Quotes

• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Motivational, Change

  Mark Twain (2016). “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain”, p.97, Chartwell

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• If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.

  George S. Patton

  Motivational, Business, Military

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• The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Life, Motivational, Jobs

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• All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Change, Success, Creativity

  Man and Superman "Maxims for Revolutionists" (1903) See Hawthorne 18

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• When you find errors in conventional wisdom-when everyone says A and A is not true-you gain competitive advantage. Only a few times do you have to find errors in conventional wisdom to make a living.

  Larry Ellison

  Errors, Gains, Advantage

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• It's easy to live the expected and conventional. It's when you live the unexpected that you start having fun with your life.

  Richard Bach

  Fun, Creativity, Ideas

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• Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps a canaary as a substitute for a husband.

  Stella Benson

  Mother, Husband, Son

  Stella Benson (1916). “I Pose”

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• Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

  Sam Walton

  Years, Opposites, Long

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• There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

  Anton Chekhov

  Vapid, Mediocrity, Useless

  "Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends: With Biographical Sketch". Book by Anton Chekhov, 1920.

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• The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Offending, Flattery, Language

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• Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Life, Being Yourself

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.149, Princeton University Press

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• It takes a lot of guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don't measure well by conventional means.

  Seth

  Mean, Wells, Guts

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• The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources.

  Carl Sagan

  Ideas, Lovely, Fundamentals

  "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". Book by Carl Sagan, p. 91, 1980.

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• He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.

  Michael Lewis

  Blessed, Class, Mind

  Michael Lewis (2010). “Liar's Poker”, p.263, W. W. Norton & Company

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• People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.

  Javier Marías

  People, Panic, Bears

  "A Heart So White" by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, New Directions, (p. 121), 2002.

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• A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities, which are called her 'duties', forbid it. Her 'domestic duties', high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are but bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through), forbid it.

  Florence Nightingale

  Light, Break Through, Habit

  Florence Nightingale (1991). “Cassandra: And Other Selections from Suggestions for Thought”, Pickering & Chatto Publishers

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• Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning?

  Elizabeth von Arnim

  Morning, Firsts

  Elizabeth Von Arnim (2006). “Elizabeth and Her German Garden”, p.42, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of prejudice and fixed ideas, when all the time it is more likely that the machine which contains them is only an elaborate cement-mixer, and when the thinking is finished, those whirling thoughts are smoothed into the unchanged conventional mould and seeing them set solid enough to dance, to build, to travel upon, we would never dream of their first deceit, of the hope once roused by their apparently violent reorganisation.

  Janet Frame

  Dream, Thinking, Ideas

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• Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

  Iain Banks

  Lonely, Night, Car

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• Then idiots talk....of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce!....But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I'll show you energy.

  Charles Dickens

  Opportunity, Energy, Deuces

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• [M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

  C. S. Lewis

  Strong, Philosophy, Thinking

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• I see the beauty of Mike's attempt to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven't the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code--monogamy, family pattern, continence, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse, and so forth--then fiddle with details...even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscene sight! (p.365)

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Sight, Female, Details

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Stranger in a Strange Land”, p.342, Penguin

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• When machines fail, when technology fails, when the conventional religion fails, people have got to have something. Even a zombin lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assult of a million flurocarbon spray cans of deoderant." - The Mist

  Stephen King

  Technology, Night, Ozone

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• The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypocritical.

  Ian Fleming

  Kissing, Hands, Boredom

  Ian Fleming (1953). “Casino Royale”

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• By morning she was dead. She had not died of starvation or committed suicide by any conventional means. She had simply willed herself to die, and being a strong-willed woman, she had succeeded. She had missed dying on her birthday by two days.

  John Berendt

  Suicide, Strong, Morning

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