As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.
Conform and be dull.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
Conformity, humility, acceptance… with these coins we are to pay our fares to paradise.
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Fear God, and offend not the Prince nor his laws, and keep thyself out of the magistrate's claws.
For all have not the gift of martyrdom.
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike.
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.
Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of the general opinion.
Take the tone of the company you are in.
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.