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Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Sep 17, 2025
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment.
Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.
Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is.
The fragrances are really a dream about the possibilities of a life. Nonconformity, no judgement.
Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them.
He who prides himself an extraordinary person by his deeds is rejected by the world; he who has independent ideas is hated by the mass.
Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.
If patience is worth anything, it must endure to the end of time. And a living faith will last in the midst of the blackest storm.
If a warrior is to succeed at anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.
I wish to suggest that ample opportunity does exist for dissent, for protest, and for nonconformity. But I must also say that the right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.
The worst curse to befall anyone is stagnation, a banal existence, the quiet desperation that comes out of a need for conformity.
For all have not the gift of martyrdom.
When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ, they showed me this picture of three oranges and a pear. They asked me which one is different and does not belong; they taught me different was wrong.
The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
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.
That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
The believer's cross is no longer any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension, the bearing of which is demanded. The believer's cross must be, like his Lord's, the price of his social nonconformity. It is not, like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictable suffering; it is the end of the path freely chosen after counting the cost. It is not, like Luther's or Thomas Muntzer's or Zinzendorf's or Kierkegaard's cross, an inward wrestling of the sensitive soul with self and sin; it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come.
The cynic says, "One man can't do anything". I say, "Only one man can do anything."
When all think alike, then no one is thinking
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
I'm not the kind of person who gives up without a fight.
Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.
It isn't fair that there's pressure exerted on those who choose to live on the edges of the bell-shaped curve of normal.
Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
People would rather be wrong than be different.
A "Normal" person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee. You know, "Each person puts in a pretty color and it comes out gray."
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.
The human condition ... is defined by the aspiration to always supersede oneself, which in turn requires nonconformity.
If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.
I think of my father growing up in South Jersey, the son of second-generation German immigrant glassblowers. The opportunities for him of feeling that aspiration, that yearning, get out of the small town, connect to a larger world, get yourself to New York, wanting to play the piano at every opportunity, bonding with people who were on a similar path, ending up in Provincetown, which was kind of nexus for nonconformity, and artistic dropout reality.
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
Do not follow where the path may lead.
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.
Nonconformity is an empty goal, and rebellion against prevailing opinion merely because it is prevailing should no more be praised than acquiescence to it. Indeed, it is often a mask for cowardice, and few are more pathetic than those who flaunt outer differences to expiate their inner surrender.
There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything.
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.