Convention Quotes

“Being classy is my teenage rebellion.”
― Rebecca McKinsey

“Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”
― Bertrand Russell

“If our thoughts are slumping down into a muddling pie of oblivion, we must empower our minds to go beyond vain details or useless conventions. Scanning the reach on the horizon and challenging our imagination can allow us to recognize the essentials of our human condition and achieve harmony in our lives.
("Dirty bike)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile — except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison.”
― Isaac Asimov, Murder at the Aba

“Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“I'm a sworn enemy of convention. I despite the conventional in anything, even the arts. I paint canvasses on the floor and drove one art teacher out of his mind. But that's just the way I paint best.”
― Hedy Lamarr

“In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.

Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“...convention [is] the most subtle but oppressive dictator.

[Edith 'Ditte' Thompson]”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“You've done the bourgeois thing, perhaps, but let's not call that love.”
― Marianne Williamson

“He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes, he saw himself born in them, he saw himself granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and his body was only it's reflection.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“The thing to do is to go on, in the same suave tone, from uttering a series of banalities to expressing a new and dangerous thought, without any break. If you succeed in this, the business is done. The reader will not forget - the new words will plague and torment him until he has accepted them.”
― Lev Shestov

“Once she wasn't supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn't like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn't. Then she was supposed to like it. To make her do something she didn't like and then make her like it, that was greater power. The greatest power of all is when she doesn't really like it but she's supposed to like it, so she has to pretend.”
― Margaret Atwood, Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, to feel alone or want to be alone is deeply unfashionable: to admit to feeling alone is to reject and betray others, as if they are not good company, and do not have entertaining, interesting lives of their own to distract us, and to actually seek to be alone is a radical act; to want to be alone is to refuse a certain kind of conversational hospitality and to turn to another door, and another kind of welcome, not necessarily defined by human vocabulary.”
― David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark time's passage without the fear that you've just frittered away your time on earth without being relevant? You'll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I don't have any? What kind of person does that make me?
Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where "all is correct." But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course." Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“... as a convention, you get up and walk to the window to make the audience believe that you're looking out. It's for the audience, not for you! And what it means to you is something emotional [...] If you went to the Actors Studio you'd spend six months seeing the snow before you could say, 'Look at the snow.' This takes a terrible burden away from the actor, who thinks he's got to see the woods and the snow. 'Give me my gun! I see a rabbit! Give me my gun!' "

Meisner sounds thrilled at the possibility of a hunt.

"That happens when you're still sitting there reading. Then when they put in the scenery you move to the window. Isn't that simple? How simple it is to solve the problem of seeing things when you know that it's all in you emotionally, and that walking to the window is only a convention.”
― Sanford Meisner, Sanford Meisner on Acting

“I look at a Sensual Lifestyle like the entrepreneur's life. We are innovative, risk-taking, and constantly in conflict with convention. Ask me about my journey out of the religious system.”
― Lebo Grand

“One day we found them. They must of been holding a gook convention or something, cause it seem like the same sort of deal as when you step on a anthill and they all come swarming around.”
― Winston Groom, Forrest Gump

“Livet består av en del galskap, og en del visdom; den som bare skriver ærbødig og konvensjonelt, utelater mer enn halvparten.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Feci presto a imparare a leggere.Tuttavia il mio pensiero si fermò a metà strada. Vedevo nell'immagine grafica l'esatto duplicato del suono che ad essa corrispondeva:emanavano insieme dalla cosa che esprimevano, e pertanto il loro rapporto non aveva nulla di arbitrario. La comprensione del segno non portò con se quella della convenzione.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?
Age, he guessed, And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one's relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.”
― Samuel Butler, Erewhon

“A Mannerist designer would attack the linguistic convention not by avoiding the use of the signal, but by misusing it notoriously.”
― Bonta

“We annihilate convention in order to experience the truth of otherness.”
― Carolyn Chun, How to Break Article Noun

“Question convention.”
― Steven Magee

“Our mother tongue, so far ahead of me,
Displays her goods, hints at each bond and link, Provides the means, leaves it to us to think,
Proffers the possibles, balanced mutually,
To be used or not, as our designs elect,
To be tried out, taken up or in or on, Scrapped or transformed past recognition,
Though she sustains, she’s too wise to direct.

Ineffably regenerative, how does she know
So much more than we can? How hold such store For our recovery, for what must come before
Our instauration, that future we will owe
To what? To whom? To countless of our kind,
Who, tending meanings, grew Man’s unknown Mind.”
― Ivor A. Richards

“[A] generation ago ... the thing to do was to get married at twenty-one and go to work immediately, regardless of one's equipment or inclination or aptitude. But now they grow up into the convention that youth, that being under thirty years of age, is a protracted sophomore course without lectures, in which one must spend one's entire time dressed like a caricature, drinking homemade booze and pawing at the opposite sex in the intervals of being arrested by traffic policeman.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“If You're Going To Be Unconventional in an area of your life, try to be conventional in all other areas”
― JB Rhine

“We'd been trying so hard to look like our heroes, we'd kinda forgotten what a hero really is. Capes, masks, powers — sure, that's great and all, but in the end ... it's just window dressing. Like Emile says: clothes don't make the man!”
― Mikko, Cosplay

“Yeah, I feel like, as women, we have to choose between two different dire4ctions to make it in this world, either we try to split from convention, set ourselves apart, break the rules. or we accept the rules and play along in order to make sure those doors open. And I can't blame any woman for whatever path she chooses.”
― Jamie Varon, Main Character Energy

“It is natural to care for those who have cared for us, but at the point a man has been dead a hundred years, no one alive who yet cares for him has any natural reason for doing so. In the several decades following a man’s death, those who knew him might carry a torch for his memory, describe the love they received from him, and champion the spirit they have inherited from him. However, if people are still willing to listen to a man one hundred years after his death, he speaks from the grave. After natural affection passes, if any affection remains, it is supernatural.”
― Joshua Gibbs