John Steinbeck Quotes

If we attach more importance to what other people believe than to what we know to be true - if we value belonging over being - we will not attain authenticity.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

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.

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

Conformism is a potent statement, and as much as we do talk about individuality in fashion, there's a sense that people are fearful of not conforming and not being part of action.

There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

My mother's mantra was, 'How would it look to the neighbors?' And so you don't do anything because you're worried about how it would look to the neighbors.

I think that we all desperately try to fit in to different molds: our parents, our bosses, our partners, social status, friends. We all figure out a look that we think will get us the job or make his parents approve of us or get that girl to want to go on a date, whatever. We all change ourselves to please whoever it is.

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?

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

We're accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I'm sure that's not any different for anyone else.

Tend to choose what is popular over what is right when they are in conflict. They desire to fit in both at church and outside of church; they care more about what people think of their actions (like church attendance and giving) than what God thinks of their hearts and lives.

Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our life trying to satisfy other people's demands. We have learned to live by other people's points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.

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.

It's so easy to get caught up in what people expect of you. Sometimes, you can just lose yourself.

I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations.

What will people say-in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.

I think guilt is the biggest problem in America, people are always feeling guilty about being themselves. You can't say what you want because it's not politically correct. You can't look like you want because you, the people at the office aren't going to like you and so on.

The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.