Virginia Woolf Quotes

A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

New customs, Though they be never so ridiculous (Nay, let em be unmanly), yet are followed.

I'm not a blender. I don't like people who blend into society.

I don't care what other people think. I hate conforming, that you have to wear this to a business meeting or that to a dinner. I've never worked that way.

We all have those friends that tick to their drum, and you don't want them to tick to anybody else's drum.

As a woman, you're expected to behave and model yourself in a certain way, but that's not right for everybody.

If you live the way others want you to, you are called a nice guy. If you live the way you want, you are called selfish.

Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always.

There is no need to accept the standards of the world at large.

One of the things that I really value about Russian culture is that on the private level it allows for a huge amount of variety and individuality with regards to family structure.

It's easier to be conformist naturally; it's easier except for those who don't like conformism.

How do cultures differ from one another? Above all, in their customs. Tell me how you dress, how you act, what are your habits, which gods you honor, and I will tell you who you are. Man not only creates culture, he carries it around with him. Man is culture.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

Custom makes monsters of us all.

The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.

I feel like we're so limited by the context at which we look at life. The way we look at who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to love... everything. I feel like that, in and of itself, is a project of a lifetime: the problem of how to break out of the limiting context that is imposed upon us by the educational system, by the church, by our parents... As a kid I rejected it without even thinking about it. Now that I'm a little older, I see how deeply destructive it really is.

We are all entitled to our little harmless habits, but we are not entitled to demand approval for them.

The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.

Society's the mother of convention.

If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.

In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.

One struggles always with these norms. So one doesn't construct oneself freely without respect to norm but one works with one's historical situation and sees where there might be some play. Where there might be some freedom to move.

Custom, madam, is the law of fools, but it shall never govern me.

Who are they to judge us, simply because our hair is long?

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.