Quotes About Convention

Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically.

There was a certain, subterranean moral code in play, but surely, I could think of a way around that old thing.

Years later a friend said to me, "When a conventional wife with a conventional husband experiences a feminist awakening, there is bound to be a marital explosion.

She picked at the place mat in front of her. "They were all in law enforcement. It was some kind of sheriff's convention. Your biological father—Earl Haynes—was a sheriff.

Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists make drawings and paintings while photographers take photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Yet, to the wigwam audience in Decatur, Lincoln presented a strange figure. He didn't seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. To the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the convention floor, "I then thought him one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw.

Still, some might say it was her duty to endure it. But she could not sacrifice self-respect on the altar of convention. That's rather a good phrase, isn't it? I must have read it somewhere.

There is no greater tyranny, Miss Rae, than convention

It wasn't the same sort of defiant attitude she saw so often among young men of the ton. She'd met so many men of that kind - the ones who made such a point of defying convention, and then spoiled the effect by going out of their way to make sure that everyone knew how daring and scandalous they were.

Then I hope you won't take offense when I say that proper young ladies really don't go about punching unsavory characters in the nose in London." "Oh, Aunt Caroline, proper young ladies really don't do that sort of thing in Boston, either.

Defying genre conventions is instantly a risky move.

I know it's dangerous to say you want to do something different with a genre because people always take that as an insult to the genre.

There's so much we can't express in our day-to-day interaction with people because it's considered inappropriate. And acting is all about being inappropriate.

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

There is no trustworthy standard by which we can separate the 'real' from the 'unreal' aspects of phenomena. Such standards as exist are conventional: and correspond to convenience, not to truth. It is no argument to say that most men see the world in much the same way, and that this "way" is the true standard of reality: though for practical purposes we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbors.

One might expect, on the basis of its overwhelming advantages, that the Dvorak keyboard would have completely replaced the inferior QWERTY keyboard. On the contrary, after more than 50 years, almost all typists are still using the inefficient QWERTY keyboard.

Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would be heaven on earth, and had turned out to be hell, here and now?

Todo en la vejez es impropio: matar, reírse, el sexo, y sobre todo seguir viviendo.

But though society had not it's formal beginning from any convention of individuals, actuated by their wants and their fears; yet it is the sense of their weakness and imperfection that keeps mankind together; that demonstrates the necessity of this union; and that therefore is the solid and natural foundation, as well as the cement, of society.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

True originality can't begin until you know what you're breaking away from.

To know how to avoid the cliche, to know what tradition you are pushing forward, begins with knowing what that tradition is.

You can be near the cliché, you can dance around it, you can run right up to it and almost embrace it. But at the last second you must turn away. You must give it a twist.

Dating across the color line was just another way of bucking convention. But since my father neither looked nor identified as black, there wasn't much risk of public censure. The women could be daring and modern without being truly radical.