Conventional Quotes

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

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Life, Motivational, Jobs

  43 Copy quote

• 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

  469 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  George S. Patton

  Motivational, Business, Military

  315 Copy quote

• All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Change, Success, Creativity

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

  96 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  148 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  366 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• There are lots of cycles to markets - boom and bust - and also in perceptions of people. The conventional wisdom of Steve Case as genius or fool was highly cyclical. The truth was always in the middle.

  Steve Case

  People, Perception, Genius

  3 Copy quote

• If you choose the sort of life which has no conventional pattern you have to try to make an art of it, or it is a mess.

  Muriel Spark

  Art, Trying, Patterns

  Muriel Spark (2015). “Robinson”, p.59, Canongate Books

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I gave up being a conventional person a long time ago. Things have been so much more exciting since I did.

  Dolores Hitchens

  Long, Exciting, Gave Up

  3 Copy quote

• How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Mean, Technology, Thinking

  Elizabeth Janeway (1987). “Improper behavior”, William Morrow

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm seeing and hearing lots of B to B instruments, and everybody isn't, you know, using them... a lot of these guys are trying to do it on conventional guitars, although that has its own sound, and maybe its okay.

  John Sebastian

  Guitar, Guy, Trying

  7 Copy quote

• I can cook to please people, but it's quite conventional. I make a good sponge cake. I find it hard to follow recipes.

  Anna Chancellor

  Cake, People, Recipes

  "My favourite table". Interview with Neil Norman, www.theguardian.com. July 22, 2007.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Suddenly creativity is the popular goal. Ironically, a quality dissonant with our conventional education process is greatly in demand in adults - and those who survive the system without losing their creative integrity are richly rewarded. The magic word in a book's title almost ensures sales: Creative Stitchery, Creative Cookery, Creative Gardening. ... Perhaps we are trying to develop something that was innately ours.

  Marilyn Ferguson

  Integrity, Book, Creativity

  3 Copy quote

• The need for sociability induce man to be in touch with his fellow men. However, this need might not ("ne saurait", Fr.) find its full (or complete) satisfaction in the conventional (or superficial, - "conventionnel", Fr.) and deceitful world, in which (or where) everyone is mainly (or mostly) trying to assert oneself in front of others ("devant les autres", Fr.), to appear, and hoping to find in society ("mondaine", Fr.) relationships some advantages for his interest and vanity (or vainglory or conceit", Fr).

  African Spir

  Men, Vanity, Trying

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 53), 1937.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am a traditionalist, I'm not a conventional person, but I am a traditionalist in the true form of the word, in that your heart is opening, you're absolutely there for everyone, the face of pain has no tradition, by the way, and in my tradition, a guru simply means the removal of darkness.

  Maya Tiwari

  Pain, Mean, Heart

  Source: www.abc.net.au

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• One who aspires to greatness should read and study, pursuing the True Way with such a firm resolve that he is perfectly straightforward and open, rises above the superficialities of conventional behavior, and refuses to be satisfied with the petty or commonplace.

  Yoshida Shoin

  Greatness, Way, Study

  "Yoshida Shoin Zenshu" by Yoshida Shoin, vol. II, 1938.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I say that children should be told about sex, I do not mean that they should be told only the bare physiological facts; they should be told whatever they wish to know. There should be no attempt to represent adults as more virtuous than they are, or sex as occurring only in marriage. There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them, and feel justified in lying to them.

  Bertrand Russell

  Sex, Children, Lying

  Bertrand Russell (1987). “Bertrand Russell on ethics, sex, and marriage”

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.

  Maria Rodale

  Choices, Rich, Clean Air

  Maria Rodale (2010). “Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe”, p.192, Rodale

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a tendency under capitalism system to reduce everything to a kind of commodity fetish, and this order tends to promote extremely conventional and uniform expressions of gender and sexuality in order to promote certain products and lifestyle choices that are commercialized. This necessarily entails a capitulation to heteronormativity, or in the case of the new gay movement, a "homonormativity" that doesn't stray far from the heterosexual paradigm. Anyone who questions these normative values and conventions is subject to disapproval, hostility, or even violence.

  Bruce LaBruce

  Gay, Order, Lifestyle Choices

  8 Copy quote

• I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.

  Richard Lewontin

  Queens, Top Down, Psychology

  Source: www.abc.net.au

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started.

  William Gibson

  People, Way, Culture

  Interview with Zack Handlen, www.avclub.com. September 7, 2010.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Because of the control of the media by corporate wealth, the discovery of truth depends on an alternative media, such as small radio stations, networks, programs. Also, alternative newspapers, which exist all over the country. Also, cable TV programs, which are not dependent on commercial advertising. Also, the internet, which can reach millions of people by-passing the conventional media.

  Howard Zinn

  Country, Discovery, Media

  "Zinn Speaks". Interview with Wajahat Ali, www.counterpunch.org. April 19, 2008.

  40 Copy quote

  Show source