Paulo Coelho Quotes

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

It's like, you can't have any fun, and if you do have fun, if you do your own thing, you're considered crazy and should be in a mental institution. Now, that's what I find creepy. I'm eccentric. I am not messed up.

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

I don't care much about conforming.

Unless you hit your television with a sledgehammer, you're not going to be able to be an individual.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

Basically, I hate conformity. I hate people telling me what to do. It makes me want to smash things. So-called normal behaviour patterns make me so bored, I could throw up!

I have a natural tendency to resist conformity.

I'm not scary. It's scary for people to see someone being nonconformist.

Don't tell me I'm crazy. I'm out here acting natural.

I haven't got a problem with sheeple calling me crazy. What's sane? What is crazy?

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s - my madness would not be an escape from “reality”.

Seek freedom from the conformity of styles

... he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, "Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don't be a part of the crowd; don't be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own. Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears." But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it.

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

If being sane is thinking there's something wrong with being different, I'd rather be completely #$%^&^& mental.

I went to public school for like, one day. I don't get it. Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing.

I just don't conform very well.

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

People relate to the spirit of the band, which is to live your way and succeed on your own terms. There's no hypocrisy in being successful and still railing against conformity.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.