Non Conformity Quotes

“You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass

“My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.

I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”
― Tom Waits

“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“We must beware of yielding to the pressure of a spirit of cowardly conformity which proclaims itself everybody's friend in the hope that everybody will obligingly return the compliment.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I'm not here to be small, to compare, to judge (myself or you), to fit in or to be perfect. I'm here to grow, to learn, to love, to be human.”
― Sue Fitzmaurice

“Once, I ordered two thousand lady bugs from the local garden center and set them loose in the atrium. I sprinkled marigold seeds in the ficus planters and put gold fish in the lobby fountain. These are things I did with no consequences, no repercussions. My nineteen detentions were for smart answers and missed homework. There is no equivalent punishment for making the world a stranger place.”
― Brenna Yovanoff

“I can’t change the world, I can only change how I choose to live in it.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“If what you create seems to turn out much stranger than who you are as a person, it's probably because your heart is talking.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Here’s to the misfits and foolish ones who think differently. They’re not fond of simplicity. They live unconventionally existing at a different level of intensity. They add elasticity and flexibility to what’s inflexibly rigid, bringing warmth to the frigid systems of existence. You can hate them acidicly, discredit their credibility or even oppose them ritualistically. Look down on them cynically, say they became great accidentally, rain on them torrentially or see brilliance academically. You can look and see density or see a lovely symphony. About the only thing you can’t do is disqualify their eligibility. Because they change history. Everything in existence moves them restlessly on to destiny backed by infinity. Their spirit is immensity, they overcome resiliently and follow their hearts existentially. Though they may be misunderstood until the next century, we see their opponents’ adrenaline as only minimally convincing, simply for a time because in them there’s a tendency for the divine to visit earth coincidentally. And while others may see misfits and foolishness we see wisdom and genius because the ones crazy enough to think they can live and love limitlessly are the ones who actually do.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help others out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.”
― jiddu krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom

“Conformity requires us to minimize our differences for the greater good. We fear that if we don't conform, we will be abandoned, but there is no loneliness like having people only see you after you've erased yourself.”
― Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary

“By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?”
― Rachel Carson

“They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying.”
― Henry James

“If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help other out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom

“No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.

Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it.”
― Ezra Pound, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound

“The impetus that makes you fly is the great store of humanity that each of us possesses. It's the feeling of interconnectedness with the roots of all power, but we soon get alarmed by it! It's damned dangerous! And so most people are glad to give up flying; they prefer walking on the sidewalk, following the rules and regulations.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“The very essence of Australia is our lack of sophistication–our refusal to conform to pretension and superficiality. We ought to be upholding our ‘fair-dinkumness’ and all the qualities so well documented in our folklore, the non-conformity of the swagman in Waltzing Matilda whose down to earth motto would I’m sure, have been ‘I’d rather be ignorant and fair dinkum than sophisticated and false’. Of course life has been a fight against ignorance, but the danger has always been that gaining knowledge rarely occurs without an increase in sophistication or falseness.”
― Tim Macartney-Snape

“If you're wonderful in any way somebody will fuck with you. Just like if you're horrible in any way they're gonna fuck with you. The world is for the average and the common. Those are the people who never hurt - they just fall asleep. The rest of us, we're The Walking Wounded.”
― Kim Fowley, Lord of Garbage

“In some cases, it is not the person that has changed, but their decision not to be themselves.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The second best thing to not chasing success is chasing success that was defined by you, not for you.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Mede stood accused of heresy. He had been seen out on the fields pointing an instrument at the Sun, a device, they said, for measuring distances. He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“You can’t keep a good woman down who sucks at being subservient.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“To creative people, the compendium of the white man's dialect are unfashionable, because their creations are more than what the tongue could say.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“What gives me strength is the feeling of being independent. In effect, I'm really just a dilettante. I've lived, explored, and worked - but only in nonjobs. I've often achieved success against all the predictions. And I've done it by following a very simple pattern of behavior: stick at it and do everything in my power to make it happen.”
― Reinhold Messner, My Life at the Limit

“Fashion makes you look like you are a mass-produced robot.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“True innovation comes not from following the crowd, but from daring to think different and standing out loud.”
― Shawpelle Mellowness, BREAK THE MOLD: The Power and Importance of Non-Conformity and Innovation

“Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original.
Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.”
― Orison Swett Marden, He Who Thinks He Can

“In order to lead the orchestra, you must first turn your back to the crowd.”
― Mike Mentzer, Mike Mentzer's High Intensity Training Program