Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?

He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly.

Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.

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.

You cannot lay down a standard which all must follow.

Instead of celebrating what makes each child unique, most parents push their children to "fit in" so that they don't "stick out." This unwittingly stomps out individuality and encourages conformity, despite these parents' good intentions

You must be in fashion is the utterance of weak headed mortals.

The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.

Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

I try to define myself through my own choices rather than just accepting society's kind of you're that, you're that, let me put you in a box kind of thing.

This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values.

When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.

But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.

The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides...It’s the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you’re writing, because the teacher won’t like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.

When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ, they showed me this picture of three oranges and a pear. They asked me which one is different and does not belong; they taught me different was wrong.

We are, all of us, creatures of habit, and when the seeeming necessity for schooling ourselves in new ways ceases to exist, we fall naturally and easily into the manner and customs which long usage has implanted ineradicably within us.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.

There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.

The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.

Custom is almost a second nature.

It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.