Conformity Quotes

“The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.”

“I will not choose what many men desire, Because I will not jump with common spirits And rank me with the barbarous multitudes.”

“Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.”

“The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action.”

“Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.”

“When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking.”

“The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”

“The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.”

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”

“We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.”

“The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.”

“The man for whom the law exists - the man of forms, the conservative - is a tame man.”

“Our expenses are all for conformity.”

“Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale.”

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.”

“To beguile the time, look like the time.”

“Conformity is the ape of harmony.”

“New customs, Though they be never so ridiculous (Nay, let em be unmanly), yet are followed.”

“People seem sheathed in their tough organization.”

“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.”

“We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.”

“Doing as others told me, I was Blind. Coming when others called me, I was Lost. Then I left everyone, myself as well. Then I found Everyone, Myself as well.”

“Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes.”

“If all you do is follow the herd, you'll just be stepping in poop all day”