Conventionally Quotes & Sayings

If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being. — Jacob Lawrence

Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present? — Roland Joffe

There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting
I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. — George Orwell

Anomie is not a danger only for the young; it may surface in what is now conventionally called the "crisis of mid-life" or anywhere else. — Walter Brueggemann

The survival rate of Dr Burton's patients approximately doubled the maximum survival rate of conventionally treated patients. Had these findings pertained to a chemotherapy drug instead of IAT, massive amounts of funding would have been allocated to investigate the drug. Once again, the politics of cancer barred a potentially valuable treatment from reaching the public. — Jared Diamond

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate. — George Steiner

He didn't seem conventionally insane in any way that I could understand. But there was no way of comprehending him. In some eerie and fundamental way, he didn't appear to belong to our world. But that didn't seem the same as being mad. — Marcel Theroux

I'm big on my kids being conventionally polite, and it works really well for them. — Mayim Bialik

When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha means that when you see that you're grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it's called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself. — Pema Chodron

The term 'globalisation' is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests. — Noam Chomsky

You may not have noticed, but I'm not what you'd call conventionally beautiful. In fact, you might say that I'm the opposite of that. Say, you know - to vocalize, sometimes ad nauseam? Do you think that there's any minute in any day when I'm not aware of how big I am? Do you think there's a single minute that goes by when I'm not thinking about how other people see me? Even though I have no control whatsoever over that? Don't get me wrong - I love my body. But I'm not so much of an idiot to think that everybody else loves it. What really gets to me- what really bothers me - is that it's all people see. — David Levithan

And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe. — Audre Lorde

Be sure to buy organic versions of the 'dirty dozen:' the fruits and vegetables that, when grown conventionally, are loaded with pesticides and chemicals: Grapes, apples, lettuce, bell peppers, carrots, nectarines, peaches, strawberries, pears, kale, and celery. — Suzanne Somers

Conventionally handsome is not really where I'm at. — Domhnall Gleeson

I am not a conventionally religious man, but in the wilderness I have come closest to finding myself and knowing the universe and accepting God - by which I mean accepting all that I don't know. — Bob Brown

Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. She told the Nazis you could not trust Hitler, and they let her go. In the days of chaperones, she hitch-hiked a ride on a French destroyer along the coast of Crete; 'All quite proper, I had my cook with me,' she explained. — Mary Allsebrook

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. — John Maynard Keynes

...to think biblically rather than conventionally, to be part of a body where radical living is becoming the norm. — Francis Chan

There are really only two standards of appellate review: plenary and deferential. Conventionally there are four basic standards (with many variants), which in ascending order of deference to the trial court or administrative agency are de novo, clearly erroneous, substantial evidence, and abuse of discretion. But the last three are, in practice, the same, because finer distinctions are beyond judges' cognitive capacity. The multiplication of unusual distinctions is a familiar judicial pathology. — Richard A. Posner

Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer. — Jonathan Raban

Luckily, there is a wind of change happening in Hindi cinema. Good work is coming to people who are not conventionally good looking like Ranbir Kapoor or Akshay Kumar. — Madhur Mittal

What is frustrating is being told that no matter how hard I've worked, it counts less than my appearance. Although if you're not considered conventionally attractive, that also becomes an issue: you know, you're a feminist because you couldn't get a man. — Gloria Steinem

Modern art, in particular, seems especially vulnerable to fraud. Its abstractions are sometimes difficult to understand or grasp, and a modern painting is often loved less because of its intrinsic quality - its beauty, as conventionally understood - than because of the identity of the painter, its mark of social status. — Peter Landesman

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right. — Walt Whitman

Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure. — A.S. Byatt

Unreasonable," "unrealistic," and "impractical" are all words used to marginalize a person or idea that fails to conform with conventionally expected standards. — Chris Guillebeau

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic. — John Burnside

The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

To get hold of the human condition, we need next a much broader definition of history than is conventionally used. — Edward O. Wilson

She is not conventionally beautiful or accomplished or elegant," Magnus continued, "but she is attractive. She does not even know how much, but every man she meets feels it and is drawn to her. The thing is, though, that most ladies feel drawn to her too. So it is not flirtation, you see. It is simply the extraordinary attractiveness of her character." -Slightly Dangerous (Bedwyn Saga #6) — Mary Balogh

According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real "me" than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is! — Alan W. Watts

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others — William Gibson

These beautiful models were walking around in the room, and then suddenly this woman who wouldn't be considered beautiful was revealed. It was about trying to trap something that wasn't conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within. — Alexander McQueen

According to Proust, one proof that we are reading a major new writer is that his writing immediately strikes us as ugly. Only minor writers write beautifully, since they simply reflect back to us our preconceived notion of what beauty is; we have no problem understanding what they are up to, since we have seen it many times before. When a writer is truly original, his failure to be conventionally beautiful makes us see him, initially, as shapeless, awkward, or perverse. Only once we have learned how to read him do we realize that this ugliness is really a new, totally unexpected kind of beauty and that what seemed wrong in his writing is exactly what makes him great. — Adam Kirsch

Jesus's use of the phrasing "a new commandment" is frequently scanted in light of its implicit ramifications. Because Jesus at the Last Supper has executed the "new covenant" with his disciples, the Great Commandment itself now acquires an unprecedented meaning. Its new meaning belongs to this sudden revelation not merely about who God is but also about what love is. Previously the Great Commandment bade us to love God and our neighbor. Now this love can be comprehended only in an incarnational situation. Its incarnate presence is the activation of profound rhizomic relations that explode from the center toward the ends of the earth. We are commanded to be incarnational in relation to one another just as God at the cross was incarnational in Christ ... We are no longer simply Christ's "followers" - the pre-Easter form of relation to a master-and-teacher that is conventionally called "disciple" - but also perpetual Christ incarnators ... — Carl Raschke

Explicit knowledge, conventionally delivered like pizza (neat boxes with toppings of concepts, theories, best practices and war stories), is consumed by the brain but not metabolized into action. The learning we call intuition, know-how and common sense gets into the blood stream through osmosis. It is shaped by social context. — Richard Pascale

Raw, glittering force, however, compounded of the cruel Machiavellianism of nature, if it is to be but Machiavellian, seems to exercise a profound attraction for the conventionally rooted. Your cautious citizen of average means, looking out through the eye of his dull world of seeming fact, is often the first to forgive or condone the grim butcheries of theory by which the strong rise. — Theodore Dreiser

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press — Warren Buffett

There are moments when I am really not happy with how I look, or I think it would be an easy way out to try and do the conventionally attractive thing. But part of it is that I don't have the energy to put on, like, makeup. If people want to do that, that's fine. But I've learned that it's not for me. — Tavi Gevinson

Lovecraft was an atheist. Edgar Allan Poe was sort of a half-assed transcendentalist. And Hawthorne was only conventionally religious. — Stephen King

With a lot of action scores, you're competing with a lot of noise. Say there's a big explosion: the music would conventionally have a lot of Hollywood-style percussion or brass, because that's the only thing that will cut through. — Steven Price

Looking good has never been the most important thing to me. Maybe it's because I'm more conventionally, um, acceptable, so it's not an issue for me. I don't know. — Kim Cattrall

People are not fat and sick because they choose to eat conventionally produced produce over organic. It's because they are not eating fruits and vegetables. — Abbie Jaye

It's true in the beginning I started playing villains, and I think that's pretty clear, because if you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles, and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains. — Willem Dafoe

IT wanted little more than a fortnight to Christmas; but the weather showed no signs yet of the frost and snow, conventionally associated with the coming season. The atmosphere was unnaturally warm, and the old year was dying feebly in sapping rain and enervating mist. — Wilkie Collins

What [American universities] need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists - all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few 'conservatives'. — Grover Furr

The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil ... . We [will] start to run out of all fossil fuels by the end of this century. — David Goodstein

In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romantic, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone. — Gilbert Seldes

What a person feels within themselves and about themselves radiates from them. Trust me, I have worked with people - both men and women - who are not what most would consider conventionally attractive, but who exude such a magnetism about them that people are compelled to watch them on stage or screen. — Amanda Schull

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency'. — Kurt Vonnegut

Collective guilt is borne by what is conventionally called the scapegoat. Now the scapegoat for white society - which is based on myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement - will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths. This brutal opposing force is supplied by the Negro. — Frantz Fanon

Those who achieved power were satisfied so long as they could merely retain it, and advertise it uncritically in the conventionally self-assertive manners. — Olaf Stapledon

I THINK IF YOU'RE GOING TO BE CONVENTIONALLY ROMANTIC YOU'VE GOT TO GO ALL THE WAY: A BEAUTIFUL DINNER SOMEWHERE LOVELY, WITH BOAT-LOADS OF FLOWERS, CHOCOLATES AND CHAMPAGNE. BUT IT MIGHT ALSO BE NICE TO WRAP UP WARM AND SIT ON A ROOF SOMEWHERE, WITH A CUP OF HOT SOUP AND YOUR GIRL, WATCH THE PLANES COME IN OVER LONDON AND LISTEN TO THE NIGHT. — Tom Hiddleston

Although she was not conventionally beautiful, she was so original that it rendered the question of beauty inconsequential. — Lisa Kleypas

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be. — George Bernard Shaw

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself. — Henri Bergson

In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted. — Bat For Lashes

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

Take away a man's actual sense of manhood - which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children - and you've got to give them something else. And they did. — Fran Lebowitz

About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. — Kurt Vonnegut

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating. — A.S. Byatt

I am not conventionally religious, but I am an ongoing student of the Old and the New Testament and the history of the Jewish people and the birth of Christianity. — Robert Littell

Normative statements about "women's roles" and girls' and women's behaviour being "appropriately feminine" were replaced with more neutral statements about what women and girl versus boys and men do and think and say they want. In this way, conventionally gendered behaviour was taken out of the context of prescription and presented as simple description. This had the possibly unanticipated consequence, though, of taking these behaviours out of the context of the social world. The descriptive approach significantly deemphasised the role of norms, social structures, and modelling in developing gendered traits. Instead, disembodied as "naked facts" of sex differences, they began to look more and more like simple reflections of male and female behaviour. — Rebecca M. Jordan-Young

That's true that I'm "not religious as that term is conventionally understood," though I've never been an atheist. Atheism is an active faith; it says, "I believe there is no God." But I don't know what I believe. I was brought up a Lutheran in Jamestown, North Dakota. I have trouble with faith. I'm not proud of this. I don't think it makes me an intellectual. I would believe if I could, and I may be able to before it's over. I would welcome that. — Rodney Stark

She was
I keep using the past tense; I ought to say she is
one of those people who, at first sight, look plain, are quiet, unassertive, unmemorable even. But who, when they start to talk and you get to know them, become more and more attractive and impressive, and you see that in fact they are beautiful. Not conventionally beautiful, not celebrity beautiful, but beautiful all through. — Aidan Chambers

Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap. — Marcel Proust

From her vantage point, looking up at [Ian] through the water-spotted and slightly blurry lenses of her glasses, he was quite literally larger than life. Right at that moment, with his hands up on his head, his muscular chest bare, and his boxer shorts clinging to him in a most revealing way, water matting the hair on his chest and his legs and his eyelashes, he was ridiculously attractive. Even with his more conventionally handsome brother standing next to him.
Of course the fact that Aaron was looking down at her with unconcealed dislike in his pretty hazel eyes might've had something to with it, as if she weren't a person but instead a pile of excrement left on his pool deck by a wart-covered troll with an intestinal ailment. — Suzanne Brockmann

the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate. — Steven Johnson

This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her - rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented. — Han Kang

I don't want to be thin or conventionally beautiful or straight or brilliant. No, what I really want - and what I never get - is to be appreciated. — John Green

Just as a chariot is verbalized, in dependence on collections of parts, so conventionally a sentient being, is set up depending on the mental and physical aggregates — Gautama Buddha

It's the things that aren't accepted as conventionally beautiful that I find more attractive. — Marc Jacobs

The machine technology takes no cognizance of conventionally established rules of precedence; it knows neither manners nor breeding and can make no use of any of the attributes of worth. — Thorstein Veblen

He was sensitive, so he had to be kind. I think of it whenever I see a young woman fawning all over a nerdy guy, some comedian or actor, thinking he couldn't ever be cruel because he's funny and he wears glasses. He's not conventionally hot, so he's not full of himself, so he'll be a good boyfriend, right?...Guys like that always seem to think they're Duckie from Pretty in Pink when they're actually Steff. — Mara Wilson

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm. — Bertrand Russell

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5) — Rabih Alameddine

I don't mind not looking conventionally - you know, attractive if that's what the part requires. — Cate Blanchett

If Elvis ..is the definition of rock, then rock is remembered as showbiz ... It becomes a solely performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes personality music ... if Dylan ... becomes the definition of rock, everything reverses. In this contingency, lyrical authenticity becomes everything: Rock is galvanized as an intellectual craft, interlocked with the folk tradition ... The fact that Dylan does not have a conventionally "good" singing voice becomes retrospective proof that rock audiences prioritized substance over style ... — Chuck Klosterman

My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play. — Marcel Proust

A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. The realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has always conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done. — Wendell Berry

Knowledge is conventionally viewed as belief plus a bunch of credentials — Kathryn Schulz

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth. — Richard Flanagan

The art of love is like your painting, it requires technique, patience, and above all, practice by the couple. It requires boldness, the courage to go beyond what people conventionally call making love. — Paulo Coelho

The moon features frequently as a simile for beauty (and indeed Budur's name means 'moons'). Beautiful women are conventionally compared to gazelles. It was more common to evoke beauty through metaphor and simile than by close physical description. — Malcolm C. Lyons

Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside. — George Bernard Shaw

I was never specifically associated with a part, I didn't have tons of money, I wasn't conventionally tall or handsome, so you know the things that were available to me were hard work and perseverance. — Seth Green

De Selby likens the position of a human on the earth to that of a man on a tight-wire who must continue walking along the wire or perish, being, however, free in all other respects. Movement in this restricted orbit results in the permanent hallucination known conventionally as 'life' with its innumerable concomitant limitations, afflictions and anomalies. — Flann O'Brien

I also generally play slide guitar in standard tuning, which enables me to switch back and forth between using the slide and fretting notes and chords conventionally without having to relearn the fretboard, as one must do when playing in an open tuning. — Warren Haynes

As many conventionally unhappy parents did in the 1950s, my parents stayed together for the sake of the children - they divorced after my youngest brother left home for college. I only wish they had known that modeling their dysfunctional relationship was far more damaging to their children than their separation would have been. — Bruce H. Lipton

I actually think Bill Gates is conventionally smarter, even though it's a dumb word, but mental processing power - I've watched him use four different screens, process information, get to the right answer, boom boom boom. — Walter Isaacson

I'm a big fan of cultural music, and that's how I try to expand my playing, by listening to music that is not conventionally American. — Steve Vai

I'm a young woman who subverts the conventionally accepted gender paradigm because I refuse to conform. — Sara Benincasa

I think it's ridiculous that you need to look a certain way to be conventionally pretty. — Kristen Stewart

People who are not fully enlightened have no business becoming parents. This contradicts the conventionally accepted notion that people have an inherent "right" to have children. They do not. People who have a compulsion to traumatize a child, even in the mildest forms, are breaking the child's human rights, though of course the parental compulsion to find false pleasure through procreation obliterates their awareness of these rights. But interestingly, many parents would agree that convicted pedophiles and child murderers have no right to procreate, because of the dynamics in which they are so likely to engage. — Daniel Mackler

Have you noticed how the cleverest people at school are not those who make it in life?
People who are conventionally clever get jobs on their qualifications (the past), not on their desire to succeed (the future).
Very simply, they get overtaken by those who continually strive to be better than they are. — Paul Arden

Where I work, in the Arab region, people are busy taking up Western innovations and changing them into things which are neither conventionally Western, nor are they traditionally Islamic. — Shereen El Feki

You can't do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or Boy Meets Girl way. — Terry Southern

All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby. — Michael Pollan

I don't have a poetry section in the bookshop.
(Don't have but should have, I have begun to think. The poetry, like everything else, is scattered thematically in a generally successful attempt to encourage punters to walk the circle, reading shelves which, if more conventionally arranged, they might feel happy to skip. But poetry - unlike fiction, biography, drama, history - continues to be generically in demand. It's not a question, as I used to assume, of no one reading poetry; more a matter of people who read poetry liking little else. They need a Section.) — Claudia Fitzherbert

Not playing by the rules, not seeing things conventionally, that's the heart of who he [ Steve Jobs] is, and he does it in small ways of everyday rebellion just almost to assert who he is, like not putting a license plate on his car. — Walter Isaacson