40 Convention Quotes

In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?

Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.

If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.

We only have one future, and it will be made of our dreams, if we have the courage to challenge convention.

It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.

The early bird catches the worm. But I have never been one for worms. I am not sure what the late bird catches but I will feast with him today. Probably porridge.

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

My advice to all who have the time or inclination to concern themselves with the international language movement would be: 'Back Esperanto loyally.'

Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilisation in high boots.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.

No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism. If he is poor he is against existing things because he cannot succeed. If he is rich, he is not faithful to his ideals. The world always demands of a prophet a double standard. He must live a life consistent with his dreams, and at the same time must obey the conventions of the world. He cannot be judged either by one or the other, but must be judged by both.

A wise man once said, 'Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.'

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.

Our duty is to feel what is great and love what is beautiful -- not to accept all the social conventions and the infamies they impose on us.

The beautiful Monique insists on joining their expedition and cannot be dissuaded; we think at first she has a nefarious motive, but no, she's probably taken a class in screenplay construction and knows that the film requires a sexy female lead. This could be the first case in cinematic history of a character voluntarily entering a movie because of the objective fact that she is required.

It's called Operation Chaos. The dream end, I mean, if people say what is your exit strate... strategery, the dream end of this is that if this keeps up to the convention, and we have a replay of Chicago 1968, with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that, that's the objective here.

'The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. Not least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident.'

Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time. ... It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there, had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!

The world is full of double beds And most delightful maidenheads, Which being so, there's no excuse For sodomy or self-abuse.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Do you think your Mother and I should have liv'd comfortably so long together, if ever we had been married?

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

I don't necessarily want to always play the leading man - I'd like to shave my head and sew my eyeballs shut. (1988)

[About Tracey Jacobs, his agent]: Tracey's taken a lot of heat over the years. She has bosses and higher-ups, and every time I take on another strange project, they're going, Jesus Christ! When does he do a movie where he kisses the girl? When does he get to pull a gun out and shoot somebody? When does he get to be a fucking man for a change? When is he finally going to do a blockbuster? (2004)

I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.

I wasn't looking for another marriage. I had been married before. He is a nice man - a geologist, an Ernest Hemingway type. But Paul and I married because of convention.

It (marriage) happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

Early rising may not be a vice : but it is certainly no virtue. The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed.

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. 'I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.' Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world - prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. (p. 56)