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Quotes about Convention

Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.
- Milan Kundera
Since its beginnings, Western music is bound, by an insurmountable convention, to the need to express subjectivity. It stands against the harsh sound of the outside world just as the sensitive soul stands against the insensibility of the universe.
- Milan Kundera
The best interpreter of the law is custom.
- Cicero
I joked at our National Convention that our party was nominating a candidate for president who was charismatic, larger than life, memorable, so they wanted to balance the ticket.
- Mike Pence
Custom is second nature.
- St. Augustine
Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.
- George Bernard Shaw
We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains -- chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment -- in a word, Circumstance -- and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.
- Mark Twain
These are classic insiders—the fussy traditionalists who operate close to the center and seldom break with convention. In such traditionalistic organizations, intelligence and decision making tend to be drawn out from the reservoir of inherited wisdom. These inherited ideas are seen to be inviolable, even sacrosanct.
- Alan Hirsch
All tradition is merely the past.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this "woman proposition"; but it's more than that, Amory; it's the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck, and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in your heart.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
A fortuneteller at a magicians' convention in Atlantic City once told him that when he fell in love it would be forever, and he laughed at the notion, but now he sees that reading was completely on target.
- Alice Hoffman
For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.
- Edith Wharton