Conformity Quotes

The longest journey is the journey inward.

If you do the task before you always adhering to strict reason with zeal and energy and yet with humanity, disregarding all lesser ends and keeping the divinity within you pure and upright, as though you were even now faced with its recall - if you hold steadily to this, staying for nothing and shrinking from nothing, only seeking in each passing action a conformity with nature and in each word and utterance a fearless truthfulness, then the good life shall be yours. And from this course no man has the power to hold you back.

Order cannot possibly be brought about through conformity to a pattern, under any circumstances.

What we need is equality without conformity.

Norwegian legislation is more in conformity with the rules of the European Union than most member states.

There are five things that societies do: They reproduce; they produce food; they organize themselves in terms of law; they organize themselves in terms of belief; and they make art. Four of them are about conformity, and in these, everything would go more smoothly if people just would shut up and do what they're told. But in art it doesn't work that way.

Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to each other which neither has with the mechanistic life...A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God...[We should] struggle to recover the sense of relation to nature and to God.

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.

I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment.

Conformity can be costly in a world of uncertainty which requires innovative institutional creation because no one can know the right path to survival. Over time, the richer the cultural context in terms of providing multiple experimentation and creative competition, the more likely the successful survival of the society

Prayer does change things, all kinds of things. But the most important thing it changes is us. As we engage in this communion with God more deeply and come to know the One with whom we are speaking more intimately, that growing knowledge of God reveals to us all the more brilliantly who we are and our need to change in conformity to Him. Prayer changes us profoundly.

Christian holiness is not a matter of painstaking conformity to the individual precepts of an external law code; it is rather a question of the Holy Spirit's producing His fruit in the life, reproducing those graces which were seen in perfection in the life of Christ.

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.

You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

In conformity with these designs on the city of Washington, and notwithstanding the disastrous results of the invasion of 1862, it was determined by the Rebel government last summer to resume the offensive in that direction.

Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.

Learning emerges from discovery, not directives; reflection, not rules; possibilities, not prescriptions; diversity, not dogma; creativity and curiosity, not conformity and certainty; and meaning, not mandates.

There is a very well-defined procedure that allows the Vatican to raise issues with a particular theologian about something that does not appear in conformity with the Catholic faith. It is not always easy to make this determination.

Rome should sometimes intervene and say this or that is not in conformity with the Catholic faith. Theologians should understand that. Some theologians go too far, for example, reducing the Catholic faith to a universal philosophy.

If I should say anything that is not in conformity with what is held by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, it will be through ignorance and not through malice. This may be taken as certain, and also that, through God's goodness, I am, and shall always be, as I always have been, subject to her.

There is such a thing as caste, even in the West; but it is comparatively faint; it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds; the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial.

Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.

My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.

Obviously, there are people who constrict themselves and build walls around themselves, whether it's from a moral standpoint or a patriotic standpoint, or just plain old conformity, and who therefore live in those little prisons, and when things breach those walls, it's shocking for them.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.

Whenever I'm asked to identify my best work, or my favorite, my answer has always been the same - 'My next one!'

Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.

I merely observe that all living things are manipulated. As long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly. Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can't be thwarted.

My point is, however, that churches do promote beliefs that would more appropriately find a place in a context of intellectual debate. They wind up cheerleading for highly dubious opinions on historical, scientific, and metaphysical matters, simply on the bases of emotional preference and the inertia of tradition. They demand conformity to these beliefs, and if you cannot swim with the current, then, well partner, maybe you'd be happier in another pool, another lake in fact, the one ablaze with burning sulfur.

The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.

What did you learn in school that you still use today? Go ahead teachers, tell me. What? Fear, conformity, don't question authority.

The attractive idea that we can now have a parliament of man with authority to control the conduct of nations by legislation or an international police force with power to enforce national conformity to rules of right conduct is a counsel of perfection.

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.

If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life.  But do your work and I shall know you.  Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.  A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity.  If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.

How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.

Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not trulycumulative treasure; where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is,--I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.

About 70% of what I've written about is centered on the clashes and conformities between the emerging life and physical sciences and older metaphysical frameworks in the 17th and 18th centuries. The other 30% consists of one-off essays or researches into other intriguing contemporary topics such as visual experience, aesthetics, social justice issues, and the epistemology of moral knowledge.

The decision for complete religious freedom and for separation of church and state in the eyes of the rest of the world was perhaps the most important decision reached in the New World. Everywhere in the western world of the 18th century, church and state were one; and everywhere the state maintained an established church and tried to force conformity to its dogma.