Conventional Quotes

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom. (Joseph Stiglitz)
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. View quote
Joseph Conrad
A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous. View quote
Graham Greene
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts. View quote
J. L. Austin
Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. View quote
Sam Walton
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it. View quote
Charles Dickens
You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional. View quote
Henry James
Never accept ultimatums, conventional wisdom, or absolutes. View quote
Christopher Reeve
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. (Ernest Hemingway)
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves. View quote
Bertrand Russell
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented. View quote
Northrop Frye
My religion centers in different areas than what's considered conventional religion. View quote
Jack Kevorkian
People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it. View quote
Anna Quindlen
Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field. View quote
Carroll Quigley
Conventional wisdom is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. 80/20 wisdom is to choose a basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk. View quote
Richard Koch
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth. View quote
Thorstein Veblen
It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty. (Alfred Jarry)
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune. View quote
Noam Chomsky
I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful. View quote
Mark Strand
The early pioneers of both wellness and network marketing were motivated by the sense that it was possible to create a better life than the conventional routes offered - better personal health and better economic health, respectively. Now the 'alternatives' of yesterday have become the economic powerhouses of today and tomorrow. View quote
Paul Zane Pilzer
The point of meditation is not merely to be an honest or good person in the conventional sense, trying only to maintain our security. We must begin to become compassionate and wise in the fundamental sense, open and relating to the world as it is. View quote
Chogyam Trungpa