Eccentricity Quotes - Page 4

• It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Believe, Mean, Insanity

  Sydney J. Harris (1976). “Best of Sydney J. Harris”

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• Eccentricities of genius.

  Charles Dickens

  Genius

  Pickwick Papers ch. 30 (1837)

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• No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.

  Yvonne Rainer

  Stars, Believe, Moving

  Yvonne Rainer (1999). “A Woman Who--: Essays, Interviews, Scripts”, p.16, JHU Press

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• Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving.

  Anna Kamienska

  Letting Go, Writing, Hands

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• When the purge of teacher individualism is unrestrained, eccentricity, initiative and individuality become the casualties.

  Andy Hargreaves

  Leadership, Teacher, Learning

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• My eccentricity became direction.

  Jean Paul Gaultier

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• This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Dream, Reality, Rocks

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1999). “The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays”, p.91, Cooper Square Press

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• I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.

  Saul Bellow

  Acceptance, Self, Eccentric

  Saul Bellow, Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (1994). “Conversations with Saul Bellow”, p.67, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Robert Scott Leyse channels Baudelaire's Queen of Spades and Jack of Hearts, speaking darkly of dead loves, in this new book. He also reminds me of James Purdy's notorious eccentricity. There's plenty of middlebrow stuff if you want it. Self-Murder isn't that.

  Kris Saknussemm

  Queens, Book, Heart

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• Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

  Richard Ford

  Memories, New Orleans, Self

  "Elegy for my city" by Richard Ford, www.theguardian.com. September 3, 2005.

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• I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.

  Rex Stout

  Men, Oddities, Technique

  Rex Stout (2013). “Fer-de-Lance/The League of Frightened Men”, p.63, Bantam

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• Never imitate the eccentricities of genius, but toil after it in its truer flights. They are not so easy to follow, but they lead to higher regions.

  Charles Dickens

  Toil, Genius, Flight

  Charles Dickens, Jenny Hartley (2012). “The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens”, p.71, Oxford University Press

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• There's a certain pattern that exists with geniuses - an eccentricity, a lack of social graces and an inability to really communicate with mere mortals.

  John Noble

  Grace, Inability, Genius

  "Fatherhood on the Fringe". Interview with Larry Getlen, www.aarp.org. November 18, 2010.

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• If you want to see eccentricities, I'll be grotesque before your eyes.

  Michael Jackson

  Eye, Insanity, Want

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• The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.

  Ben Macintyre

  Book, Men, Games

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• ECCENTRICITY, n. A method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Fool, Incapacity, Distinction

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.51, 谷月社

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• At least Manhattan, in terms of danger and eccentricity, is much more of a theme park now. You couldn't really shoot the old Law & Order in New York today. It's a different city.

  Chris Noth

  New York, Order, Law

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• Pop music can somehow survive being inhibited and mangled by its harsh and stupid commercial chains, and there is surely irreducible potential because of the 'star system' and the volatile attention pop receives for multiples of wickedness, ridicule, discontent, eccentricity, desire to thrive importantly in a genuinely popular context.

  Paul Morley

  Stars, Stupid, Desire

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• There is such a thing as genius, and these are people who do not have a formal disability, DSM-IV-type. They may have liberal eccentricities or quirks in their personality, but they don't rise to the level of a disability.

  Darold Treffert

  People, Personality, Genius

  "Conversations on Creativity with Darold Treffert, Part I: De". Interview with Scott Barry Kaufman, www.psychologytoday.com. April 11, 2011.

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• Those whose abilities or knowledge incline them most to deviate from the general round of life are recalled from eccentricity by the laws of their existence.

  Samuel Johnson

  Law, Humanity, Existence

  Samuel Johnson (1848). “The Wisdom of the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler”, p.396

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• There's not much room for eccentricity in Hollywood, and eccentricity is what's sexy in people.

  Rachel Weisz

  Sexy, People, Hollywood

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

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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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