Quotes about Nonconformity
I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.
— Jack Kerouac
Our best work can't possibly appeal to the average masses, only our average work can. Finding the humility to happily walk away from those that don't get it unlocks our ability to do great work.
— Seth Godin
If taking one-self seriously as a woman means committing to a life of grooming, pumicing, pruning and polishing one's exterior for the benefit of onlookers, then I may as well leave my unwieldy rucksack to the top of a bleak Scottish hill and make my home there under a stone, where I'll fashion shoes out of mud and clothes out of leaves.
— Miranda Hart
Attraction is what happens between you. It's not universal. And it's not conventional. And thank God for that.
— Rainbow Rowell
As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
— Wendell Berry
I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
— Henry David Thoreau
Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.
— Henry David Thoreau
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.
— Henry David Thoreau
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.
— Henry David Thoreau
customs and habits of men are not a matter for conflict. The saints do not get excited about the things that people eat and drink, wear on their bodies, or hang on the walls of their houses. To make conformity or nonconformity with others in these accidents a matter of life and death is to fill your interior life with confusion and noise. Ignoring all this as indifferent, the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside.
— Thomas Merton
Human Salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Whosoever would be a man must be a non-conformist.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson