Conforming Quotes
More Conforming Quotes
Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.
mary renault— Phaedrus by Plato, as translated in the novel, p. 104
Only while they are conforming their actions to the model of some archetypal hero do the Arunta feel that they are truly alive, for in those roles they are immortal. The occasions on which they slip from such molds are quite meaningless, for time immediately devours those occasions and reduces them to nothingness.
huston smith— On Australian indigenous spirituality.
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring . And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul .
j. g. ballard— Interview (30 October 1982) in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.
learned hand— "The Preservation of Personality" (2 June 1927).
The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.
katie melua— Neil McCormick (2007-09-15). "Katie Melua: I want to start afresh". The Telegraph.
Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.
laura riding— Laura Riding and Robert Graves from A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927)
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes.
— Marchel Duchamp, quoted by Harriet & Sidney Janis in "Marchel Duchamp: Anti-Artist" in View magazine (3/21/45); reprinted in Robert Motherwell, Dada Painters and Poets (1951).
School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.
dan savage— American author, media pundit, journalist, and activist for the LGBT community
Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.
— Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil's Dictionary.
