Top 100 Quotes About Eccentricity
#1. I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.
Rex Stout
#2. There's not much room for eccentricity in Hollywood, and eccentricity is what's sexy in people.
Rachel Weisz
#3. No one can be profoundly original who does not avoid eccentricity.
Andre Maurois
#4. Solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public ... [p. 7]
Shirley Hazzard
#5. 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
#6. I suspected eccentricity was often if not always a response to pain, a defense mechanism against anguish and torment and sorrow.
Dean Koontz
#8. 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
#9. [ ... ] 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
#10. There is nothing more amazing than the extraordinary sanity of the insane! Unless it is the extraordinary eccentricity of the sane!
Agatha Christie
#11. It was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry. He could not understand why such people had been born. "It's nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry" he would say. "I've been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it.
Halldor Laxness
#12. I felt it would to add a great deal to my legend for eccentricity.
Roger Ebert
#13. Eccentricity may be diverting, Mama, but it is out of place in a wife: certainly in my wife!
Georgette Heyer
#14. If to live in this style is to be eccentric, it must be confessed that there is something good in eccentricity.
Jules Verne
#15. Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line,
Ryan Holiday
#16. 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
#17. Society doesn't need that everybody is behaving in the full normal way ... like people in a Buddhist monastery ... But eccentricity may also connect with the irrational.
John Muir
#18. There is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness.
Charles Stross
#19. 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
#20. The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity.
Joseph Brodsky
#21. I adore Britain! It's my favourite country; I love their eccentricity. I find Britain so inspiring.
Stefano Gabbana
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Now I'm old ... maybe I'm still an eccentric hippie. There's a wonderful freedom in the eccentricity - you can go places, you can be wacky, and you don't have to be constrained. I think that's why people are eccentric - eccentricity is a weapon ... and it's great!
Sylvester McCoy
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. When the purge of teacher individualism is unrestrained, eccentricity, initiative and individuality become the casualties.
Andy Hargreaves
#30. 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
#31. Accustomed like the white blackbird to the loneliness of eccentricity yet never quite reconciled to it, they found in each other's oddness a most comforting compatibility.
Elizabeth Goudge
#32. Eccentricity is the universal trait of humanity.
Dean Koontz
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
Robert Frost
#38. 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
#39. The Brits always favor the underdog. There's an eccentricity to us, and I think you can see that through the fash- ion and the music and the way people look.
Guido Palau
#40. Eccentricity is not a psychiatric disorder.
Bill Dedman
#41. Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.
John Dewey
#42. Eccentricity: strength of character doubling back on itself.
Mason Cooley
#44. There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#45. It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story The Book-Bag.
Robin McKinley
#46. Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. New Age eccentricity could only take you so far before you wandered into mentally ill territory.
M.M. McLaughlin
#51. 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
#52. Even for an inbred clan deep in the swamp, she thought they might well be considered a peculiar bunch, but then the family always had run to eccentricity.
Robert Dunbar
#53. One is expected to show a bit of eccentricity to be interesting. Otherwise one is simply a sad old crone, and no one wants that, you know.
Camilla Lackberg
#54. It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.
Sydney J. Harris
#55. My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.
Martin Short
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one's cell phone is a charming eccentricity ... my children aren't buying it.
Alice McDermott
#60. 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
#61. Eccentricity gives misfits a way of fitting in.
Mason Cooley
#62. I pay for what I call eccentricity and my will to evolve.
Daveigh Chase
#63. 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
#64. Eccentricity is originality that leads nowhere.
Mason Cooley
#65. Eccentricity is one syndrome of genius;
it seldom needs a cure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#66. If you define eccentricity as creativity, then yes, creativity is eccentricity.
Russell Smith
#67. Eccentricity is one of those English traits that look like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.
Ben Macintyre
#68. 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
#69. Eccentricity, to be socially acceptable, had still to have at least four or five generations of inbreeding behind it.
Osbert Lancaster
#70. Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#71. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained.
John Stuart Mill
#72. ECCENTRICITY, n. A method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity.
Ambrose Bierce
#73. I'm convinced England's overflowing with eccentric people, places, happenings. Indeed, you might say eccentricity's normal in England.
Dodie Smith
#74. Don't confound static electricity with ecstatic eccentricity. One will leave your hair up, the other will live up in the air!
Ana Claudia Antunes
#75. '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
#76. Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.
Neil Simon
#77. 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
#78. Having grown up in the Middle East, eating beans for breakfast always seemed like a bizarre British eccentricity.
Yotam Ottolenghi
#79. 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
#80. Robert Scott Leyse channels Baudelaire's Queen of Spades and Jack of Hearts, speaking darkly of dead loves, in this new book. He also reminds me of James Purdy's notorious eccentricity. There's plenty of middlebrow stuff if you want it. Self-Murder isn't that.
Kris Saknussemm
#81. We all try to be alike in our youth, and individual in our middle age ... although we sometimes mistake eccentricity for individuality.
Alec-Tweedie
#82. Did her faint eccentricity of manner mask something more serious, some fundamental cognitive problem?
Robert Galbraith
#83. She felt certain she could make the trip in a quarter hour on Emery's paper glider, but he insisted that the world wasn't ready for such eccentricity.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. I certainly do not adore the writer's discipline. I have lost lovers, endangered friendships, and blundered into eccentricity, impelled by a concentration which usually is to be found only in the minds of people about to be executed in the next half hour.
Maya Angelou
#88. To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity.
Steven Brust
#89. Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have.
Oliver Sacks
#90. [Scottish songs] are, I own, frequently wild, & unreduceable to the more modern rules; but on that very eccentricity, perhaps, depends a great part of their effect.
Robert Burns
#91. 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
#92. I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.
David Bowie
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich; otherwise you're just crazy.
Yvon Chouinard
#100. Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane.
Bruce Robinson
