Non Conformity Quotes - Page 3

• You spoke about things they couldn't see and so they laughed. Yet to row up the dark river against the current, to take the unknown road blindly, stubbornly, and to search for words rooted like the knotted olive tree- let them laugh. And to yearn for the other world to inhabit today's suffocating loneliness, this ravaged present- let them be.

  Giorgos Seferis

  Loneliness, Dark, Other Worlds

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• I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

  Mary McCarthy

  Mean, Thinking, Self

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• I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

  Oscar Wilde

  Hands, World, Conformity

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.162, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• One day you're there and then all of a sudden, there's less of you. And you wonder where that part went. If it's living somewhere outside of you. And you keep thinking maybe you'll get it back. And then you realize it's just gone.

  Elisabeth Moss

  Thinking, Mad Men, One Day

  "Mad Men: Meditations in an Emergency". TV Series, www.imdb.com. 2008.

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• In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top of them with the phone saying, "Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine." The trunks shudder.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Home, Phones, Light

  Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Knopf

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• I am moving deeper into my own brain.

  Peter Porter

  Moving, Brain, Conformity

  Peter Porter (1972). “Preaching to the converted”, Not Avail

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• Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Being Yourself, Being Single, Individuality

  "Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life". Book by Louis Kronenberger, 1954.

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• One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Revolution, Conformity, Rebellion

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• Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.

  Jean Dubuffet

  Goodbye, Farewell, Long

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• Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Healing, Emotional, Flow

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

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• That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.

  Learned Hand

  Religious, Eye, Winning

  "A Plea for the Open Mind and Free Discussion" (speech), Albany, N.Y., 24 Oct. 1952

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• If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility. You alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Success, Responsibility, Assuming

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• My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.

  William Carlos Williams

  Roots, Youth, Conformity

  William Carlos Williams (1995). “Paterson”, p.31, New Directions Publishing

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• In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

  John Stuart Mill

  Character, Order, Break Through

  John Stuart Mill (2003). “Mill's On Liberty”, p.81, Agora Publications, Inc.

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• If some of the greats had followed the traditional ways we would be missing so much fine art.

  Gene Black

  Art, Missing, Would Be

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• Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

  Oscar Wilde

  Witty, People, Conformity

  Oscar Wilde, Alyssa Harad (2005). “The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays”, p.251, Simon and Schuster

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• Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

  Matthew Arnold

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Sadness

  'Self-Dependence' (1852) l. 31

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• There are plenty of people in the world whose lives are governed by rote and routine. Such people will never be happy dealing with me, because I don't conform.

  John Elder Robison

  People, Routine, World

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• What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Love, Heart, Dark

  The House of the Seven Gables ch. 11 (1851)

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• I think when you're an adult you start to like the very things that make you different. If you obsess about some defect, you make it obvious to everyone, and suddenly everyone is staring at just that defect. It's always like that. The more you hide something, the more it shows. But when you accept your defect, suddenly no one on earth sees it anymore.

  Audrey Tautou

  Thinking, Adults, Different

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• A "Normal" person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee. You know, "Each person puts in a pretty color and it comes out gray."

  Allan Sherman

  Color, Being Different, Might

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• For a man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost...Not 'til we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Eye, Men, Needs

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• To be original, or different, is felt to be "dangerous."

  Carl Rogers

  Different, Conformity, Mental Health

  Carl Rogers (2012). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.348, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I was an onion, layers and layers and layers under a thin, papery skin. If anyone had been able to cut me open, my bitter, irritating juices would have stung their eyes, and they would have cried. Although I couldn't cry myself, much at the time. But no one would cut me open.

  Crescent Dragonwagon

  Eye, Cutting, Skins

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• Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.

  Henry Miller

  Self Control, Conformity, No Hope

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