Quotes on Nonconformity

There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything.

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

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.

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.

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.

You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.

The individual has always to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

I shall assume that your silence gives consent.

There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

None but ourselves can free our minds.

I reject any path which rejects life, but I can't help loving Sufism because it sounds so beautiful. It gives relief in the midst of battle.

The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own.