Virginia Woolf Quotes

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

Conformity is dangerous.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

You may be educated abroad, you may be a great scientist, politician, but you always have a sneaking fear that if you don't go to temples or do the ordinary things that you have been told to do, something evil might happen, so you conform. What happens to the mind that conforms? Investigate it, please.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

I decide to do what I always do when I'm not sure what's going on: I act like everyone else.

Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of the general opinion.

Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.

Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.

Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

The head of dullness, unlike the tail of the torpedo, loses nothing of the benumbing and lethargizing influence by reiterated discharges.

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine. I feel nothing at all.

It is often easier as well as more advantageous to conform to other men's opinions than to bring them over to ours.

No reason makes it right To shun accepted ways from stubborn spite; And we may better join the foolish crowd Than cling to wisdom, lonely though unbowed.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

We must dress according to the dictates of fashion, make love whether we feel like it or not, kill in the name of our country, wish time away so that retirement comes more quickly, elect politicians, complain about the cost of living, change our hairstyle, criticize anyone who's different, go to a religious service and beg forgiveness for our sins and puff ourselves up with pride because we know the truth and despise the other tribe who worships a false god.

If you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.

Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra - the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities...