That nagging sense that we should be doing something more, something different than what we’re doing. That’s conformity creeping in, and it can be a real drag. Especially when you consider all the amazing opportunities out there that could be happening if you just dared to break out of the mold.
If you’re feeling stuck, check out these quotes about conformity for some inspiration. You may find that embracing your individuality is exactly what you need to get moving in the right direction. So go ahead and be yourself – the world needs more people like you!
Quotes About Conformity
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
Albert Einstein
Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.
Bernard Baruch
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
John F. Kennedy
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Rudyard Kipling
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Friedrich Nietzsche
No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Rollo May
The individual has always to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.
Robert Green Ingersoll
The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.
Rita Mae Brown
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke
Our expenses are all for conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.
Albert Einstein
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Henry David Thoreau
If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.
Johann von Goethe
Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
Anton Chekhov
By being yourself, you put something beautiful into the world that was not there before.
Edwin Elliot
Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.
Allen Ginsberg
It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had the individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions.
Robert Green Ingersoll
No one ever made a difference by being like everyone else.
Buckminster Fuller
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Aldous Huxley
I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Find your own way, open your treasure house, invent your own answer to the chaos.
Gertrude Stein
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
Albert Einstein
Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.
Edward Abbey
I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious.
Carl Sagan
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Alice Walker
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau
The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.
Rita Mae Brown
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
George Santayana
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Oscar Wilde
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Oscar Wilde
If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you.
Vincent O’Sullivan
Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.
John Jakes
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You cannot change what you are, only what you do.
Philip Pullman
It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive – to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are..
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
H. P. Lovecraft
The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.
Michael Crichton
Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
Mark Twain
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be ones self and unafraid whether right or wrong is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.
Irving Wallace
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Rollo May
It’s both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
Amy Tan
Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish.
Hermann von Helmholtz
I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of the general opinion.
Benjamin Franklin
Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
Bertrand Russell
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Jack Kerouac
I didn’t care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn’t feel like I wanted to do.
Suzanne Farrell
The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.
Friedrich August von Hayek
I am moving deeper into my own brain.
Peter Porter
Conformity is inevitable when folks huddle together in rebellion.
Herbert Gold
Conformity makes everything easier, if you can still breathe.
Mason Cooley
Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.
Jane Rule
Conformity, humility, acceptance with these coins we are to pay our fares to paradise.
Robert M. Lindner
Virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.
Aristotle
Conformity””the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
Mark Twain
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.
Louis Kronenberger
Surveillance breeds conformity.
Glenn Greenwald
When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God.
Kenneth Lee Pike
Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
Alexander Hamilton
Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who’d rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.
Karen Armstrong
Happiness is a certain activity of soul in conformity with perfect goodness.
Aristotle
Which path do you intend to take, Nell?’ said the Constable, sounding very interested. ‘Conformity or rebellion?’ Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded – they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.
Neal Stephenson
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
Christopher Morley
Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one’s own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.
Sydney J. Harris
The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.
Robert Anthony
We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.
Charles Dudley Warner
To be one’s self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.
Irving Wallace
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.
Carter G. Woodson
If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.
Thomas J. Watson
I have spent a great deal of my life being part of minorities. Some of the people I admire the most in the world have had the courage to defend, against wind and tide, minority viewpoints in those frightening times when any disagreement with universal conformity is identified as treason.
Antonio Munoz Molina
Conformity is an imitation of grace.
Simone Weil
Nothing is more restful than conformity.
Elizabeth Bowen
All art is based on non-conformity.
Ben Shahn
See what no one else sees. See what everyone chooses not to see – out of fear, conformity, or laziness. See the whole world anew each day.
Patch Adams
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
Robert M. Pirsig
Tradition implies authority, conformity, imitation, following.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
It is the active exercise of our faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its opposite.
Aristotle
The virtue in most request is conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we need is equality without conformity.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
Immanuel Kant
Great thoughts are against all doctrines of conformity.
Austin Osman Spare
How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
William S. Burroughs
Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
John Taylor Gatto
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
H. L. Mencken
Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To Confucius, harmony was consensus, not conformity. It required loyal opposition.
Evan Osnos
The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.
Ambrose Bierce
Reject labels. Reject identities. Reject conformity. Reject convention. Reject definitions. Reject names.
Ming-Dao Deng
The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
A man must consider what a blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.
Eric Hoffer
Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.
Alfie Kohn
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Henry David Thoreau
Order cannot possibly be brought about through conformity to a pattern, under any circumstances.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
Theodor Adorno
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
Jacob Bronowski
Remember: Bureaucracy elevates conformity … Make that elevates ‘fatal stupidity’ to the status of religion.
Frank Herbert
I propose . . . . The conformity of the proposed Constitution to the true principles of republican government.
Alexander Hamilton
Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
Walter Bagehot
A person is bound to work in obedience to and in conformity to that person’s own nature.
Mahatma Gandhi
The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement.
Aristotle
Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.
Thomas Jefferson
The only law which is really lived up to wholeheartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity.
Henry Miller
Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.
George Orwell
These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.
Herbert Read
I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.
R. Buckminster Fuller
I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.
Howard Mumford Jones
The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions.
Walter Darby Bannard
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive.
Oscar Wilde
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
George Santayana
The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions – not obstinately or defiantly.
Rollo May
While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.
Oscar Wilde
Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity, are both uncivilized and undemocratic.
Mahatma Gandhi
One can be committed to conformity or one can be committed to truth, but not both.
George H. Smith
Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; ’tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be a hero you have to learn to be a deviant — because you’re always going against the conformity of the group.
Philip Zimbardo
I am neither for conformity nor non-conformity. I am for individuality. If one’s individuality is in effect non-conformity, then so be it. But basically, one’s individuality consists of conformity–to one’s self.
Paul Krassner
Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.
Rollo May
To go to war without the Security Council will not be in conformity with the Council.
Kofi Annan
With the spread of conformity and image-driven superficiality, the allure of an individuated woman in full possession of herself and her powers will prove irresistible. We were born for plenitude and inner fulfillment.
Betsy Prioleau
There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them.
Aristotle
The truth of practical intellect is understood not as conformity to an extramental being but as conformity to a right desire; the end is no longer to know what is, but to bring into existence that which is not yet.
Jacques Maritain
A mind that is disciplined, controlled, is free within its own pattern; but that is not freedom. The end of discipline is conformity; its path leads to the known, and the known is never the free.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?
Ben Shahn
No man on earth is truly free, All are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.
Euripides
We may say of agreeableness, as distinct from beauty, that it consists in a symmetry of which we know not the rules, and a secret conformity of the features to each other, as also to the air and complexion of the person.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Happiness is something final and complete in itself, as being the aim and end of all practical activities whatever …. Happiness then we define as the active exercise of the mind in conformity with perfect goodness or virtue.
Aristotle
The happy man . . . will be always or at least most often employed in doing and contemplating the things that are in conformity with virtue. And he will bear changes of fortunes most nobly, and with perfect propriety in every way.
Aristotle
The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.
Julian Schwinger
How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.
Kenneth Tynan
Art is not a mirror but an icon. It takes the chaos in which we live and shows us structure and pattern, not the structure of conformity which imprisons but the structure which liberates, sets us free to become growing, mature human beings.
Madeleine L’Engle
It’s the lack of humanity in the human psyche that haunts me. The hypocrisy. How people as a group can take something like tolerance and contort it into a new form of intolerance and conformity. The way humanity can justify any kind of evil.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.
Henry David Thoreau
Of the opinions of philosophy I most gladly embrace those that are most solid, that is to say, most human and most our own; my opinions, in conformity with my conduct, are low and humble.
Michel de Montaigne
I guess I am doomed to remain an outsider to the end, lacking as I am the indispensable qualities of an academic insider: school loyalty, conformity to the procedure, and readiness to obey by the school-endorsed criteria of cohesion and consistency.
Zygmunt Bauman
We ought, so far as it lies within our power, to aspire to immortality, and do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest that is within us; for even if it is small in quantity, in power and preciousness, it far excels all the rest.
Aristotle
I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels.
Paul Goodman
If you desire truly to live you will cease trying to find magic tricks and short-cuts to life and learn the simple laws of being, and order your life in conformity with these. Realign your life with the laws of nature””this and this alone constitutes living to live.
Herbert M. Shelton
Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.
Franz Boas
The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.
Solomon Asch
Conformity can be costly in a world of uncertainty which requires innovative institutional creation because no one can know the right path to survival. Over time, the richer the cultural context in terms of providing multiple experimentation and creative competition, the more likely the successful survival of the society.
Douglass North
If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.
Carl Rogers
It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.
Antonin Artaud
A Final Word
These quotes can be inspiring or discouraging, but they all have one thing in common – the idea that it’s important to be yourself. It can be hard to break out of the mold and do something different, but as these quotes illustrate, it’s worth it. And remember, if you need help getting started on your dream career or business venture, we’re here for you.
What’s your favorite quote about conformity? Leave a comment and let us know.
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