Quotes & Sayings About Eccentricity

Eccentricities of genius. — Charles Dickens

Eccentricity gives misfits a way of fitting in. — Mason Cooley

There was an otherworldly quality about him, the aura of one privy to secret communiques in forgotten languages. — James K. Morrow

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity. — David Bowie

There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity. — C.M. Kornbluth

Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. — John Stuart Mill

Princeton isn't actually part of New Jersey. It's a small island of wealth and intellectual eccentricity floating in the Sea of Central Megalopolis. It's an honest-to-god town awash in the land of the strip mall. Hair is smaller, heels are shorter, asses are tighter in Princeton. — Janet Evanovich

My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity - in the sense that I'm willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing. — Jaron Lanier

ECCENTRICITY, n. A method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity. — Ambrose Bierce

I'd rather be a little weird than all boring. — Rebecca McKinsey

Clancy comments that the subtleties of national character can impact the world stage by making espionage more difficult. Americans were quirky by nature, making the sorts of eccentric moves that had to be followed up on as potential espionage cues. Russians, on the other hand, were too orderly by nature to make such distractions appear natural. — Tom Clancy

The world thinks eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Because of his unusual way of handling language, Cummings had to travel a long road from the time his early books were ridiculed for their eccentricity to the point at which, with Robert Frost, he was one of the two most popular poets in America. — E. E. Cummings

Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The difference between eccentricity and originality in historical studies is often difficult to detect at first encounter. When a radically new interpretation of a large segment of history makes its appearance, time is needed to sift the evidence. — Edmund Morgan

I knew by this time what Thea thought of these people and in fact of most people, with their faulty humanity. She couldn't stand them. And what her eccentricity amounted to was that she proposed a different kind of humanity altogether. I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything. Thea's standard was high, but she wasn't exactly to blame as having arbitrarily set it high. For when she talked to me about some particular person she'd be more frightened than scornful. People with whom she had to struggle scared her, and what I'd call average hypocrisy, just the incidental little whiffs of the social machine, was terribly hard on her. As for greediness or envy, fat self-smelling of appreciation, hates and destructions, fraud, gnawing, she had a very poor tolerance of them, and I'd see her go out in the eyes in a really dangerous way at a gathering. — Saul Bellow

Eccentricity is the universal trait of humanity. — Dean Koontz

'The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game. — Ben Macintyre

Jessica had, however, convinced herself that Richard's troll collection was a mark of endearing eccentricity, comparable to Mr. Stockton's collection of angels. — Neil Gaiman

It is only to the sentimentalist over some tame midland prospect that man appears vile. In Sirene he holds his own with the sublime eccentricity of the natural scene. In Sirene he lives. — Compton Mackenzie

Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy. — James Hillman

It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich; otherwise you're just crazy. — Yvon Chouinard

Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of "eccentricity" it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences. — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd. — Edith Sitwell

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. — Joseph Brodsky

At least Manhattan, in terms of danger and eccentricity, is much more of a theme park now. You couldn't really shoot the old Law & Order in New York today. It's a different city. — Chris Noth

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. — T. S. Eliot

People who read too many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. Market research depends on people behaving as if they were all alike. — John Taylor Gatto

Writers have a well-deserved reputation for being eccentric. Everything you've heard is true. — Sara Sheridan

Sarek frowned. "Insubordination?"
"Eccentricity," Spock replied. "Captain Kirk allows a great deal of leeway as long as his crewmembers do their jobs well. Mr. Chevron simply takes advantage of it."
"That good at his job, is he?" asked Sarek.
"Indeed. Extremely good. — Jean Lorrah

When I look at my clothes, I think of them as an expression of the joy and fun of fashion - with a bit of English eccentricity thrown in. — Suzy Menkes

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. — Bertrand Russell

Minimalism? It is something I appreciate as an art form but leave to others - unless you count a collection of warhorse-workwear Yves Saint Laurent trouser suits. Maybe my penchant for hippie-deluxe eccentricity came from an escapist dream of a different world. It was tough being a working mom in the 1970s. — Suzy Menkes

I never knew whether I was drawn to eccentric people or if they were drawn to me. — Dean Koontz

If you define eccentricity as creativity, then yes, creativity is eccentricity. — Russell Smith

My grandmother's greatest gift was tolerance. Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated. Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones. Gay people were seen as magical too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives! My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians. "Jeez," she said, Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who's going to pick up all the dirty socks?" (155) — Sherman Alexie

Your daughter would like to know if you are still going insane, dear." Paw considered this. "I've been married to your mother for over two decades. You might allow me certain dispensation for eccentricity. — Gail Carriger

Intellectual effort for its own sake, they call eccentricity. — Arthur Schopenhauer

My beauty is my eccentricity, when I am out people stare at me and speak, look at that creative guy, unique guy, different guy. — Amit Kalantri

Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line, — Ryan Holiday

There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful. — Dave Hickey

Eccentricity is one of those English traits that look like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity. — Ben Macintyre

The most beautiful lives, to my mind,are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle, and without eccentricity. — Michel De Montaigne

It was as if she had been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life and be a law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career. — E.A. Bucchianeri

I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish. — Edith Sitwell

This psychic wound appears to be suffered largely by men. Women writers weren't included in the Romantic roll-call, and never had a lot of Genius medals stuck onto them; in fact, the word 'genius' and the word 'woman' just don't fit together in our language, because the kind of eccentricity expected of male 'geniuses' would simply result in the label 'crazy,' should it be practiced by a woman. — Margaret Atwood

[ ... ] my quirks had gone beyond eccentricity, past the warm waters of weird to those cold, deep patches of sea where people lose their lives. — Emma Forrest

Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have. — Oliver Sacks

No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved. — Yvonne Rainer

I love and admire everyone who is different. I love that. The 'jet set' is banal. 'Good taste' is banal. Eccentricity is chic. Good taste paralyzes. But punk or street fashion or a tattoo-covered body, that is interesting to me, and that I love. I didn't go to fashion school. I learned from watching couture shows on TV and reading magazines. That made me dream. — Jean Paul Gaultier

The whole point of extravagance is to act like a fool and feel like a fool, but enjoy it. — Alfred Bester

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity. — Robert Frost

We have for too long been taught that the sight of a man speaking to himself is a sign of eccentricity or madness; we are no longer at all habituated to our own voices, except in conversation or from within the safety of a shouting crowd. — Teju Cole

Of course, ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance. — Sherman Alexie

There's a certain pattern that exists with geniuses - an eccentricity, a lack of social graces and an inability to really communicate with mere mortals. — John Noble

We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance. [ ... ] We may prate of toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of mistaking sages for lunatics and saviours for blasphemers. We must persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first, to be very careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence. — George Bernard Shaw

There has been a marvelous joyous carnival of mourning for Edith Piaf and Jean Coctaeau, and it was real! They died as they had lived, with style and grace and their proper eccentricity; and Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time. So do I. — Katherine Anne Porter

There's this thing called the competence-deviance hypothesis," she explained. "It says that the more competent an individual is in his field - the more respected he is in the community - the more his eccentric behavior will be tolerated by others. "But the opposite is true for young people, because they have not done anything to earn respect in a community. So when they do weird things they are treated like dangerous animals and hustled into cages. It seems unfair when older, respectable members of the community do stuff that's even stranger and people just shake their heads and smile at their eccentricity." I — John Elder Robison

There must be room in our world for eccentricity, even if it offends the prudes, and room for the vague other-worldliness that often goes with genius. — Boris Johnson

I look on the opposite sex with something like the admiration with which I regard the starry sky on a frosty December night. I admire the beauty of the Creator's workmanship, I am charmed with the wild but graceful eccentricity of the motions, and then I wish both of them goodnight. — Robert Burns

There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He had not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town's consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit's harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. "That's the Southern way" my grandmother said. "That's the nice way. — Pat Conroy

Writers are, as a profession, nothing if not eccentric. — Sara Sheridan

Hang on to your eccentricities, because they will give you a style. — John Scofield

With the world securely in order, Dain was able to devote the leisurely bath time to editing his mental dictionary. He removed his wife from the general category labeled "Females" and gave her a section of her own. He made a note that she didn't find him revolting, and proposed several explanations: (a) bad eyesight and faulty hearing, (b)a defect in a portion of her otherwise sound intellect, (c) an inherited Trent eccentricity, or (d) an act of God. Since the Almighty had not done him a single act of kindness in at least twenty-five years, Dain thought it was about bloody time, but he thanked his Heavenly Father all the same, and promised to be as good as he was capable of being. — Loretta Chase

My music has a high irritation factor. I've always tried to say something. Eccentric lyrics about eccentric people. Often it was a joke. But I would plead guilty on the grounds that I prefer eccentricity to the bland. — Randy Newman

Those whose abilities or knowledge incline them most to deviate from the general round of life are recalled from eccentricity by the laws of their existence. — Samuel Johnson

Eccentricity, to be socially acceptable, had still to have at least four or five generations of inbreeding behind it. — Osbert Lancaster

Always wise aunts come in many guises. There are maiden aunts, dowager aunts, and that delightful creature, the eccentric aunt. I fear I fall into the latter category. — Sara Sheridan

Why do you love it? I had a sense that I would enjoy her answer. I knew it would be unexpected and unique. Everything about her was unexpected and unique. She was my bright light of eccentricity in a very predictable and ordinary world. She made everything new and interesting or funny. — Penny Reid

I felt it would to add a great deal to my legend for eccentricity. — Roger Ebert

The good thing about New Orleans is that, overall, it's an accepting place. It's accepting of eccentricity, it's accepting of excess, it's accepting of color, in the sense of culture, not necessarily in the sense of race. — Christopher Rice

Madness was all very well if you were Alma and in a profession where insanity was a desirable accessory, a kind of psycho-bling. You couldn't get away with it down Martin's Yard, though. In the reconditioning business there was no real concept of delightful eccentricity. You'd find yourself as the recipient of a pharmaceutical lobotomy provided on the National Health, as a result of which your waistband would expand as your abilities to think, talk and respond to stimuli contracted. This — Alan Moore

Eccentricity may be diverting, Mama, but it is out of place in a wife: certainly in my wife! — Georgette Heyer

I'm convinced England's overflowing with eccentric people, places, happenings. Indeed, you might say eccentricity's normal in England. — Dodie Smith

The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction. — Hugh MacLeod

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. — John Stuart Mill

There is, indeed, nothing more vexing than to be, for example, rich, of good family, of decent appearance, fairly well educated, not stupid, rather good-hearted even, and at the same time to possess no talent, no special quality, no eccentricity even, not a single idea of one's own, to be precisely "like everyone else."
One is rich, but not so rich as Rothschild; of a good family, but one which has never distinguished itself in any way; of decent appearance, but an appearance expressive of very little; well educated, but without knowing what to do with that education; one is intelligent, but without one's own ideas; one is good-hearted, but without greatness of soul, and so on and so forth. There are a great number of such people in the world, far more than it appears. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

No, I'm a very normal and orthodox person that goes out of their way to present eccentricity. It's not that I do that so much now but I've been doing it for so many years that it's become routine now. — Tony Kaye

The Auditors had tried to understand religion, because so much that made no sense whatsoever was done in its name. But it could also excuse practically any kind of eccentricity. Genocide, for example. By — Terry Pratchett

I pay for what I call eccentricity and my will to evolve. — Daveigh Chase

If to live in this style is to be eccentric, it must be confessed that there is something good in eccentricity. — Jules Verne

I suspected eccentricity was often if not always a response to pain, a defense mechanism against anguish and torment and sorrow. — Dean Koontz

me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy — G.K. Chesterton

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly. — Kate Atkinson

My eccentricity became direction. — Jean Paul Gaultier

My family has always believed that when we are faced with large and apparently impossible problems, the best solutions are found by the insane people, not the sensible ones. — Lisa Kleypas

It is, I believe, one of the few dangerous forms of eccentricity, a highly contagious mania, to be precise, of the rampant social variety! In your friend's case, we may not yet be dealing with out-and-out insanity ... No ... Maybe his trouble is only exaggerated conviction ... But the contagious manias are well known to me! ... I've known a good many sufferers from conviction mania ... Of many different types ... And in the last analysis, those who talk about justice seem to be the maddest of the lot! ... At first, I must confess, I took a certain interest in justice fanatics ... Today those particular maniacs annoy and exasperate me more than I can tell ... Don't you feel the same way? ... Human beings show a strange aptitude for transmitting this mania. It terrifies me, and we find it, mind you, in all human beings! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Eccentricity is not a psychiatric disorder. — Bill Dedman

The magical encounter with the Beethoven quartet, the Bach suite, the Brahms symphony, in which your whole being is gripped by melodic and harmonic ideas and taken on a journey through the imaginary space of music - that experience which lies at the heart of our civilisation and which is an incomparable source of joy and consolation to all those who know it - is no longer a universal resource. It has become a private eccentricity, something that a dwindling body of oldies cling to, but which is regarded by many of the young as irrelevant. Increasingly young ears cannot reach out to this enchanted world, and therefore turn away from it. The loss is theirs, but you cannot explain that to them, any more than you can explain the beauty of colours to someone who is congenitally blind. — Roger Scruton

It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science. — Marilynne Robinson

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley — Nicholas Murray

Solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public ... [p. 7] — Shirley Hazzard

Britain wouldn't have won the war without its eccentric geniuses. — Sara Sheridan

It's not that gays and diversity equal high technology. But if your culture is not such that it can accept difference, and uniqueness and oddity and eccentricity, you will not get high tech industry. — Richard Florida

When I was around 19 years old, working in the college library, I was talking to a friend of mine and this older woman interrupted and said "You're too young to know about Billie Holiday." My response was "I'm too young to know about Shakespeare, too ... should I not read him? — Wanda Lea Brayton

There is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness. — Charles Stross

We all try to be alike in our youth, and individual in our middle age ... although we sometimes mistake eccentricity for individuality. — Alec-Tweedie

Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane. — Bruce Robinson

My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized. — Martin Short