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1 " What are you going to do with your life?" In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever; teachers, her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer an answer... " Live each day as if it's your last', that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance. "
2 " 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. "
3 " A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet " for sale" , who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his " normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves. "
4 " But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains. "
― Alan W. Watts , The Way of Zen
5 " As commonly practiced, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs. "
― John Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
6 " Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune. "
7 " The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened. "
― Timothy B. Tyson , Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
8 " How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. "
― Carl Sagan , Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
9 " It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Buck story: a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom. "
― , Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
10 " I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.”She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.“Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees. "
― Michael Cunningham , A Home at the End of the World
11 " No pain, no gain." You can hear the phrase in the world of physical exercise and conditioning. Muscles that feel no pain are probably getting neither stronger, nor more flexible. It presents an analogy for the exercise of the heart. Those who run the risk of genuine love alone must worry about emotional pain. The more friends; the more good-byes - and the more wakes to attend, the more graves to visit, the more deaths to share. Those who truly live life to the fullest will bear the full cup of suffering. Only those who are willing to pay the price in pain and anguish find life full to the brim. Happy people also suffer; they are no more lucky than the rest. They create their own happiness. That's the rule of thumb.Some thumbs, however, don't seem to rule very well. Slogans and catch-words, for all their conventional wisdom, fail to carry the whole weight of truth; they leave too much room for false inferences. " No pain, no gain" may leave one with nothing but pain - an intolerable amount of it. There is simply no guarantee that pain will bring gain, that hardship will yield happiness, that suffering will make one a better person. It may; but it's not inevitable. "
12 " Fuck You Poem #45Fuck you in slang and conventional English.Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked, and defaced.Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side.Fuck you humidly and icily.Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery.Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill.Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.Fuck you puce and chartreuse.Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.Fuck you under the influence of opiun, codeine, laudanum, and paregoric.Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead.Fuck you at low and high tide.And fuck you astride anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways, bathrooms, or kitchens.Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,that bind me, till I forgive you, to you. "
13 " The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force. "
― Zeena Schreck
14 " If contemporary Christians took seriously the possibility that those outside the boundaries of the church might hold the promise of renewal, if we ceased regarding ourselves as the source of salvation and the secular world as a potential threat, and if we emulated Jesus' example in accepting the faith and the courage of those who live beyond conventional standards of purity, well, I can hardly imagine how things would look. "
15 " Don’t accept any knowledge or conventional wisdom without critically questioning it first. "
― Debasish Mridha
16 " Homeschool history tells of more than two centuries of home-teaching influence on American education, although it has been largely obscured by the drawn curtains of conventional bias. "
― Raymond S. Moore , School Can Wait
17 " On a certain level, homeschooling is all about socialization. Whatever the teaching methods used in school or homeschool, it is ultimately the social environment itself that distinguishes homeschooling from conventional school. This social environment includes the nature and quantity of peer interaction; parental proximity; solitude; relationships with adults, siblings, older children, younger children, and the larger community; the ways in which the children are disciplined and by whom; and even the student-teacher ratio and the overall environment where the children spend their time. "
18 " Jefferson attributes to a college professor and mentor his lifelong habit of questioning conventional wisdom. "
― John Ferling , Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation
19 " The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypocritical. "
― Ian Fleming , Casino Royale (James Bond, #1)
20 " The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules "
― Douglas Adams , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)