Conventionalism Quotes

“The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“The narrower their lives, the wider their hips.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“This box is useless," said Alliance 6-7349.

Should it be what they claim of it," said Harmony 9-2642, "then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“It comforted the great to deal with it and they knew, a man who could reduce any color to grey.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“ERNEST FRIEDLANDER: Be quiet! Be quiet!

LEO MERCURÉ: Why should we be quiet? You’re making enough row to blast the roof off! Why should you have the monopoly of noise? Why should your pompous moral pretensions be allowed to hurdle across the city without any competition? We’ve all got lungs. Let’s use them! Let’s shriek like mad! Let’s enjoy ourselves!”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living

“What differentiated us was our perception of our mutual reality, which made no difference.”
― Mie Hansson, Where Pain Thrives

“We are conventional people, and conventions — if you will but see it — are majestic in their way, and will claim us in the end. We do not live for great passions or for great memories, or for anything great.”
― E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

“The greatest thing about our times is that you don't need permission to express yourself the way you wish. Sometimes people tell themselves they can't do it, because they're missing this or that, but historically, specialization is a recent convention. Most of us are born natural polymaths.”
― Nuno Roque

“I'm glad I do not have a rebellious nature, so I am not forced to do things just because others do not want.”
― Luigina Sgarro

“LEO MERCURÉ: The Daily Express says (the play)’s disgusting.

GILDA: We should be cut to the quick if it said anything else.”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living

“This attitude finds a late but still abundantly clear expression in the conventions of the classical court theatre, in which the actor, quite regardless of the demands of stage deception, addresses the audience directly, apostrophizes it, as it were, with every word and gesture, and not only avoids ‘turning his back’ on the audience but emphasizes by every possible means that the whole proceeding is a pure fiction, an entertainment conducted in accordance with previously agreed rules. The naturalistic theatre forms the transition to the absolute opposite of this ‘frontal’ art, namely the film, which, with its mobilization of the audience, leading them to the events instead of leading and presenting the events to them, and attempting to represent the action in such a way as to suggest that the actors have been caught red-handed, by chance and by surprise, reduces the fictions and conventions of the theatre to a minimum. With its robust illusionism, its forthright and indiscreet directness, its violent attack on the audience, it expresses a democratic conception of art, held by liberal, anti-authoritarian societies, just as clearly as the whole of the courtly and aristocratic art—by its mere emphasis of the stage, the footlights, the frame and the socle—is the unmistakable expression of a highly artificial, specially commissioned occasion, from which it is obvious that the patron is an initiated connoisseur who does not need to be deceived.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages