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"It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher."
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Exlpore more Conformity quotes
"If I have forfeited the ability to wonder so as not to offend the tenets of the culture, and if I have sacrificed warm dreams on the cold altar of conformity, it is likely because I have somewhere traded the marvel of the infinite for the malaise of the finite."
"Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as or at least compatible with their beliefs."
"A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience."
"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
"Stay in the middle of the bell-curve of social norms and follow along, or you will find out the about freedom you never had."
"Fashion condemns us to many follies the greatest is to make oneself its slave."
"People like us are dead to society unless we're pretentious, tell people what they want to hear, take off our clothes, or pretend to be like them."
"The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity."
"I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre."
"Who was I fooling, telling my heart to quiet its beautiful song so I could march in the parade of conformity? My biggest fool was me."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained."
"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfAated but life-enhancing thoughts."
"A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me."
"A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation."
"If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us."
"Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it."
"A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily."
"Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess."
"If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains."
"The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts."
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