Sylvia Ashton-Warner Quotes

These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.

Fitting in is boring. But it takes you nearly your whole life to work that out.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

You'll never stand out if your goal in life is to fit in.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

If you don't have any individuality and you're happy just being one of the girls (or boys) be my guest. I'm not the fashion police. I won't fault you.

Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it.

Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.

Everybody wants to make a difference, but nobody wants to be different. And you simply cannot have one without the other.

Apparently God makes us all different. Some of us are happy to respond to His individual touch on our lives by remaining individuals, and others of us are intimidated or frightened into trying to become like each other so that we have company, so that we don't feel so lonely.

I don't think anyone aims to be typical, really. Most people even vow to themselves some time in high school or college not to be typical. But still, they just kind of loop back to it somehow. Like the circular rails of a train at an amusement park, the scripts we know offer a brand of security, of predictability, of safety for us. But the problem is, they only take us where we've already been. They loop us back to places where everyone can easily go, not necessarily where we were made to go. Living a different kind of life takes some guts and grit and a new way of seeing things.

Our education apparatus can't be one that produces robots. That can happen in laboratory. There has to be overall personality development.

The hardest struggle of all is to be something different from what the average man is.

I find the earth to be a place of misery in which I am surrounded by the conformity that kills society.

There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.

When I first got into the league, I tried to fit in. Now I don't care.

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

I always tried so hard to fit in, and then I figured out that I didn't want to fit.

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

I've tried actively to define myself and redefine myself, and not be pigeonholed.

There's nothing worse than having everybody thinking alike, talking alike and having the same direction in mind. It gets stale that way.

You can admire people for sure, and they're worth admiring, but you need to find that special thing about yourself. It takes working hard, getting the technique, and learning to sing and all that stuff, but the master class is about bringing yourself to the role.

Some days, I think maybe we should try and be a little more conventional, but every time I try, I fail, so I'm learning to not even entertain that thought anymore.

I think my biggest learning experience is that it's okay to be who you are - you don't have to exactly fit the mold of what people think a certain kind of career is. I think that discovery - of really knowing who I am and being okay with that and loving myself - was amazing.