Quotes & Sayings About Conventionality

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency. — Dodie Smith

Historically, Alaska is a place that has attracted those fed up with conventionality. — Bill O'Reilly

Though we are grateful for the affection 30 Rock has received from critics and hipsters, we were actually trying to make a hit show. We weren't trying to make a low-rated critical darling that snarled in the face of conventionality. We were trying to make Home Improvement and we did it wrong. — Tina Fey

Perhaps you confuse virtue and convention, gentlemen. Conventionality is not morality, and self-righteousness is not religion. — Juliet Gael

Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure time for freedom than unconventionality does. — George Bernard Shaw

What future did the Jazter see for himself, exactly? Would his days of shikar continue indefinitely, or did he dare look beyond the beaches and the train stations and the alleys? Could he, in some part buried deep within, secretly crave conventionality? (Or was that too much of a heresy?) — Manil Suri

I still vote civilization a nuisance, society a humbug and all conventionality a crime. — Isabella L. Bird

Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearances before reality, form before content ... — Ellen Key

There is no more useless activity than that of periodization, the packaging of history, in particular cultural history, into discrete eras - the Jazz Age, the Greatest Generation, the Eisenhower years, the Sixties. Such periods can never be honestly articulated without recourse to so many demurrals and arbitrary demarcations, and the granting of so many exceptions, as to render them practically useless for any kind of serious historical purpose. In times of supposed license, repression reigns freely all around; in eras renowned for their conventionality, oddballs and freaks hoist their banners high. — Michael Chabon

We are not supposed to all be the same, feel the same, think the same, and believe the same. The key to continued expansion of our Universe lies in diversity, not in conformity and coercion. Conventionality is the death of creation. — Anthon St. Maarten

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality. — Florence Nightingale

What worse illness can there be than acute conventionality. You should pray every night that you don't wake up with it. — George Weinberg

Curiosity did NOT kill the cat; conventionality did. — Lisa Laird DiRosso

Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you. — Mason Cooley

It is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

The conventionality of the English is something I find unattractive - the whole lack of joy in the physical. — Denholm Elliott

USAGE, n. The First Person of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as long as the fashion. — Ambrose Bierce

There is a bond of fellowship in sorrow that knows no conventionality. — Harold Bell Wright

Here society is reduced to its original elements, the whole fabric of art and conventionality is struck rudely to pieces, and men find themselves suddenly brought back to the wants and resources of their original natures. — Francis Parkman

It is unquestionably true that the investment companies have their money more conventionally invested than we do. To many people conventionality is indistinguishable from conservatism. In my view, this represents erroneous thinking. Neither a conventional nor an unconventional approach, per se, is conservative. — Warren Buffett

I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality. — Ad Reinhardt

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. — Charlotte Bronte

'Mediocre' tends to mean 'undistinguished', while snobs enjoy their distinguishing hallmarks of style - how they wear clothes, use words, where they go and gather and gossip ... Whatever the circumstances the genius has put you into, the fact of individuality defends the soul against all class-action claims. No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality, whatever your personal record of middling achievements. — James Hillman

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. — Pauline Kael

The standard heroes and heroines of novels, are personages in whom I could never, from childhood upwards, take an interest, believe to be natural, or wish to imitate: were I obliged to copy these characters, I would simply
not write at all. Were I obliged to copy any former novelist, even the greatest, even Scott, in anything , I would not write
Unless I have something of my own to say, and a way of my own to say it in, I have no business to publish; unless I can look beyond the greatest Masters, and study Nature herself, I have no right to paint; unless I can have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent. — Charlotte Bronte

... She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul. — Vladimir Nabokov

Conventionality is not morality. — Charlotte Bronte

All human rules are more or less idiotic. — Mark Twain