Quotes About Nonconformity

I refuse to settle for what you call reality.

Be Different Be unique. Be different. Stop following the crowd. Listen for the sound of that distant drum. The successful person and the average person approach life differently. The average person, it seems to me, likes to take the easy way out. It's almost as if the average person wants to get through work just to rush home to do very little, or nothing at all. Television

Know the spirit of the age and consciously resist conformity to it (Romans 12:2). As D. L. Moody said, "The ship belongs in the water of the world, but if the water gets in the ship, it sinks.

They have sex. They do not have a sex. In their erotic lives, they are not required to act out their status in a category system—because there is no category system. There are no sexes to belong to, so sex between creatures is free to be between genuine individuals—not representatives of a category. They have sex. They do not have a sex.

That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time.

Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.

That so few dare be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time.

As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day—though he left school at ten. (...) Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

Real books, unlike schoolbooks, can't be standardized. They are eccentric; no book fits everyone.

Free men and women are often very eccentric.

Was it possible I did like kids, just not the script written for them?

It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.

Contemporary art hates you.

A black sheep in the family, no doubt

If there was only the "right" way to do something, Fosbury would never have flopped

The iconoclasm need not be loud and messy, I can almost hear him saying

The usual channels of university studies or secretarial work did not appeal to me. I cherished difficult dreams through confidence in myself.

He is a teenager, after all-a strange agent with holes in his jeans, studs in his ear, a tail down his neck, a cap on his head (backward).

That's what my mother doesn't understand about my lipstick and dark clothes. I don't wear tattoos to freak her out; I wear them because I have to. It's me.

Before you can be eccentric you must know where the circle is.

screw the rules i have money

They were looking for lovable women. Stella would be the first to admit that she failed on that front. She was too awkward, too outspoken, too argumentative. Too peculiar.

Dare to be/remain unique in all you do. For, you can't/won't make a difference if you decide to be like someone else/others.

I shall never utterly admire anyone except a man dishonored — and happy. There is a man, I should say, who defies the opinion of his fellows and who finds consolation and happiness in himself alone.