Paulo Coelho Quotes

I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing.

I'm not cutting my hair because I'm not going to be fake.

I can't stay within the constructs of societal expectations.

At the Harvard Business School, I really felt I had gained the ability to resolve difficult issues. But I also felt that I wasn't in the mainstream with my fellow students. During job-hunting season, for example, everybody shaved their beards for interviews. I thought, 'This is crazy.' So I grew a beard.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

I seem to disappoint people a bit. They want the full regalia - but I don't walk around in a corset the whole time.

I don't believe in societal restrictions. It wasn't a choice - conformity simply never occurred to me.

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

When I was young, we were taught not to dunk. We were taught not to stand out from the rest of the team. It's different now.

The free, self-determining, self-developing soul may not walk its own path, however innocently, but must fit into the scheme and pattern …

Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.

Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.

We're all weirdos, and people want to work so hard to fit into society, but it's like, no matter what you do, you're never going to be what society depicts as what's perfect, because that's not real. The only point that you have to make is that 'I'm being me.'

I've tried not to get too bogged down by what people want you to be.

I want to set an example and say that you don't need to wear a certain color, a certain type of maang tika; your hair doesn't have to look a particular way.

You don't have to make yourself look like people expect you to look.

Too often athletes think there's these norms that I have to fit into and there are people that I have to please.

Who says what is the right way and what isn't? That is some imagined social construct that people made up to feel okay about being average.

I am fascinated by that person who is trying to live authentically, but they are on the outside of society, so how do they manage in the world around them?

Societies have been conditioned to believe that entertainers are just that, but I refuse to be put into the box of a puppet.

I'm sick of people putting boxes around everyone, telling you where and how you have to fit in.

I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?

We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.