Quotes About Conventional Life

#1. We can raise our sights high when we're willing to break free from being conformists who live a conventional life simply because we are too afraid to express our uniqueness.

Alexandra Stoddard

#2. I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.

Joan Didion

#3. The town's young parents especially prized this idea of Newton as a child's paradise. Many of them had left the hip, sophisticated city to move here. They had accepted massive expenses, stultifying monotony, and the queasy disappointment of settling for a conventional life. To

William Landay

#4. I have tried and failed to lead a conventional life. When I try to be like other people, I fall out of bed.

Marian Engel

#5. Art pierces opaque subjectivity, the not seeing of conventional life, and discloses reality.

Langdon Brown Gilkey

#6. I lead a very conventional life.

Joan Didion

#7. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children ... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.

Anne Sexton

#8. I've never really lived a conventional life, so I think it's quite foolish for me or anyone else to start thinking that I am going to start making conventional choices.

Madonna Ciccone

#9. When you're about to get married, and then you're not, it's all a big shock. You think, 'Well, okay, so I'm never going to lead a totally conventional life now.'

Rosamund Pike

#10. Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

Edna O'Brien

#11. It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.

Robert Jay Lifton

#12. I've always wanted to lead an ordered, relatively conventional and private life.

George Harrison

#13. Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness.

Joseph Conrad

#14. It was called Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, and its author, a man named Barry Magid, argued that the idea of using meditation to make your life 'better' or 'happier', in any conventional sense, was a misunderstanding.

Oliver Burkeman

#15. Genius feels like an over extended Helium balloon about to burst, and everyone criticizes you for not having a conventional way of coping with it.

Solange Nicole

#16. Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.

Jonathan Franzen

#17. Everyone needs to take control of his or her own life by making sense of it. It doesn't matter how conventional or unconventional that process is.

Mariel Hemingway

#18. Perhaps the most widely accepted and damaging element of dietary Conventional Wisdom is that grains are healthy - the "staff of life" - as we've been led to believe our entire lives.

Mark Sisson

#19. Art is not just ornamental, an enhancement of life. It is a path in itself, a way out of the predictable and conventional ... a map to self discovery.

Gabrielle Roth

#20. Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life?

Paul Cezanne

#21. The conventional definition of reality, and the idea of 'normal life', mean nothing.

Sigmar Polke

#22. Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.

Kenneth Clark

#23. Tolerance of diversity is imperative, because without it, life would lose its savor. Progress in the arts, in the sciences, in the patterns of social adjustment springs from diversity and depends upon a tolerance of individual deviations from conventional ways and attitudes.

Alan Barth

#24. I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

Ben Lerner

#25. Virtually all of the extremely important services that nature provides are completely ignored by conventional economics. The ozone layer, for example, shields all life from DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation.

David Suzuki

#26. All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature.

Paul Gauguin

#27. Dewey repudiated what he called militant atheism. He felt that people have innate religious qualities, such as compassion for sufferers, an urge to improve life, and a sense of awe before the mysteries of existence. However, by the standards of conventional religion, Dewey was an atheist.

James A. Haught

#28. George VI in the conventional parlance was a Good King who sacrificed his life to his sense of duty. If we are to have monarchs it would be hard to find a better one.

A.J.P. Taylor

#29. Switters had always seemed to take a both/and approach to life, as opposed to the more conventional and restrictive either/or.

Tom Robbins

#30. I like to think of myself as a free spirit. I've never married. I'm not conventional in that way. But I do like romance. I've been fortunate enough that I've had great love, and I've dated remarkable men in my life. I'm very thankful for all of that.

Patricia Clarkson

#31. Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.

Will Self

#32. Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.

Franz Marc

#33. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

Archibald MacLeish

#34. Even if conventional medicine tells you that your condition is incurable or that your only option is to live a life dependent on drugs with troublesome side effects, there is hope for improving or reversing your condition.

Leon Chaitow

#35. I've always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don't stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it's all happening at once.

Kate Grenville

#36. Not everyone wants this conventional little life you're rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it's time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I'm not afraid.

Zadie Smith

#37. There isn't much about my life that's been particularly conventional.

Ken Livingstone

#38. Conventional wisdom tells us to avoid taking unalterable action while at a low point in life. I have never been conventional.

Therese Fowler

#39. The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it's enormously useful in life.

Larry Ellison

#40. The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.

Stephen Jay Gould

#41. That's the way life is: meaning is always there, but there is no clearly given way of decoding it. Conventional cinema obscures this with an easy reduction of meaning to plot and schematic characters.

Lenny Abrahamson

#42. But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then - all the combinations made - they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.

Leo Tolstoy

#43. My life hasn't been conventional and it hasn't been linear. I've had to make it up as I've gone along, which has taught me a lot. If you don't accept the obvious options that are laid out for you, it's up to you to work out where you're going and to create your own specific rules and goals.

Beth Ditto

#44. If you choose the sort of life which has no conventional pattern you have to try to make an art of it, or it is a mess.

Muriel Spark

#45. If you are the kind of person who listens to conservative advice, you may do okay in life, but you probably won't ever be a fantastic leader. You have to take risks, and you also have to go against conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom doesn't make for startling advances in society.

Ruth Simmons

#46. You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.

Henry James

#47. My father was in real estate, banking, and land management. As family life, it was very conventional, happy, and comfortable. We weren't wealthy, but we were well-off.

Julia Child

#48. No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

Andre Breton

#49. Anyone who was a rebel at one time in life cannot return to being conventional.

Elsa Peretti

#50. A noble journey through the travails of time calls for a person to disregard conventional social, cultural, and moral contexts and strive to cleave a personal meaning that guides their existence.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#51. It's easy to live the expected and conventional. It's when you live the unexpected that you start having fun with your life.

Richard Bach

#52. I think politics is a higher build in life. You know? If you diffuse under normal, common sense of a story, you make it political. If you choose a conventional way for a story, or refuse to use the conventional way, you make it political.

Bernardo Bertolucci

#53. Men have desired, and justly, that women should learn from their confessions in regard to the conflict between man and woman. But woman, because of the conventional conception of womanly purity, has been intimidated from conceding to men a deep insight into her erotic life experiences.

Ellen Key

#54. If you do not want an average life, you must be on guard against, and quietly suspicious of, conclusions made by conventional thinking.

Andy Andrews