Quotes About Convention

Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.

That's it?" "That's it. And then you jump in. It's all just tradition. I mean,

Sanity ... had it ever been more than a convention -- a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?

My point was very simple, and it was that it is absolutely absurd for the United States of America to continue to urge us further down the line towards a federal superstate when the U.S. has not even signed up to the U.N. Convention on Human Rights.

When you're used to being prepared to reject conventional wisdom, it leaves you open to learn more.

I use the same big studios that everybody else uses, but my attitude once inside is that of a total barbarian.

I like taking genres and subverting them. I did that with 'In the Valley of Elah.' I said, 'Okay, this is just a murder mystery. Relax.' And then, two thirds of the way through, I broke every convention of a murder mystery.

People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.

So what is it to be? Banality of convention or banality of individuation? Shall I choose society's clichés or my own? Is it a step forward to have understood that there is no real difference between them?

La loi de la pluralité des suffrages est elle-même un établissement de convention, et suppose au moins une fois l'unanimité.

Una vez libres los hijos de la obediencia que deben al padre, y el padre de los cuidados que debe a los hijos, recobran todos igualmente su independencia. Si continúan unidos luego, ya no lo es naturalmente, sino voluntariamente, y la familia misma no se mantiene sino por convención.

What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.

I might be at a point where I don't want to go with a genre convention but I have to produce some pages. It's hard work. And it requires you learn certain skills.

If you do something that's really original, you discover why everybody else does it the other way, usually. There's a reason cliches exist, 'cause they work.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

Whenever a film doesn't follow to the letter the preset strict conventional rules of today's commercial cinema, it's considered weird.

Whether rich or poor, a home is not a home unless the roots of love are ever striking deeper through the crust of the earthly and the conventional, into the very realities of being, not consciously always; seldom, perhaps; the simplicity of loving grows by living simply near nature and God.

You know, I never went to music school, and it's always seen as this very proper, serious thing to compose a string arrangement.

I want people to think about movies and how we watch them. Let them know it's okay to question the structure or how we're sometimes duped into a false sense of normalcy. Most of all, I want people to question the old standard practices of, 'This is how the structure of something should work,' or, 'This is how a character must behave.'

I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention, and there's something about extreme emotional experiences that gives us a heightened clarity, I think, of thought and of feeling.

The whole essence of humanitarian work and the Geneva Convention is that neutral, impartial organisations can operate during war.

It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty.