Eccentricity Quotes

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”
― Edith Sitwell

“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“I am an artist you know ... it is my right to be odd.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“I'd rather be a little weird than all boring.”
― Rebecca McKinsey

“Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“No matter how valuable you are and your ideas, fools will certainly play both of you down, so exclude yourselves from the inflammatory environs of fools.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“The whole point of extravagance is to act like a fool and feel like a fool, but enjoy it.”
― Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

“The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.”
― Hugh MacLeod

“There was no Disney World then, just rows of orange trees. Millions of them. Stretching for miles And somewhere near the middle was the Citrus Tower, which the tourists climbed to see even more orange trees. Every month an eighty-year-old couple became lost in the groves, driving up and down identical rows for days until they were spotted by helicopter or another tourist on top of the Citrus Tower. They had lived on nothing but oranges and come out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast.
"The Miami Seaquarium put in a monorail and rockets started going off at Cape Canaveral, making us feel like we were on the frontier of the future. Disney bought up everything north of Lake Okeechobee, preparing to shove the future down our throats sideways.
"Things evolved rapidly! Missile silos in Cuba. Bales on the beach. Alligators are almost extinct and then they aren't. Juntas hanging shingles in Boca Raton. Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo skinny-dipping off Key Biscayne. We atone for atrocities against the INdians by playing Bingo. Shark fetuses in formaldehyde jars, roadside gecko farms, tourists waddling around waffle houses like flocks of flightless birds. And before we know it, we have The New Florida, underplanned, overbuilt and ripe for a killer hurricane that'll knock that giant geodesic dome at Epcot down the trunpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller.
"I am the native and this is my home. Faded pastels, and Spanish tiles constantly slipping off roofs, shattering on the sidewalk. Dogs with mange and skateboard punks with mange roaming through yards, knocking over garbage cans. Lunatics wandering the streets at night, talking about spaceships. Bail bondsmen wake me up at three A.M. looking for the last tenant. Next door, a mail-order bride is clubbed by a smelly ma in a mechanic's shirt. Cats violently mate under my windows and rats break-dance in the drop ceiling. And I'm lying in bed with a broken air conditioner, sweating and sipping lemonade through a straw. And I'm thinking, geez, this used to be a great state.
"You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bough a time share. Or maybe you end up at Cape Canaveral, sitting in a field for a week as a space shuttle launch is canceled six times. And suddenly vacation is over, you have to catch a plane, and you see the shuttle take off on TV at the airport. But you keep coming back, year after year, and one day you find you're eighty years old driving through an orange grove.”
― Tim Dorsey, Florida Roadkill

“Originals cost more than imitations.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He had not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town’s consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit’s harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. “That’s the Southern way” my grandmother said. “That’s the nice way.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Eccentricity may be diverting, Mama, but it is out of place in a wife: certainly in my wife!”
― Georgette Heyer, Sylvester or The Wicked Uncle

“Longevity-and sanity. Eccentric old ladies on Harleys I can deal with.”
― Alison Larkin, The English American

“What makes you unique is what makes you attractive.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Let her be. She got a right to be different. She gonna stumble on herself one of these days. Just let the child be.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“The Meyricks had their little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother's blood as well as the father's, their minds being like mediaeval houses with unexpected recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps and sudden outlooks.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Don't you ever realise," said Helen, "that the way we live is unlike the way other people live?"

"On the whole I should have thought that was cause for satisfaction.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“We want to be just wonky enough to be interesting, but not so wonky that our life is unbearable or painful.”
― Robin Ince, I'm a Joke and So Are You: Reflections on Humour and Humanity

“If all the eccentricities and all the strangenesses in this world suddenly disappear, people will fall asleep from the boredom! Every kind of oddities make life more interesting, less boring!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“She’s a little lost girl in her own little world,
She looks so happy but she seems so sad, oh yeah,
Oh, oh, yeah.
She’s a little lost girl in her own little world,
I’d like to help her, I’d like to try, oh yeah,
Oh, oh yeah.

She talks to birds, she talks to angels,
She talks to trees, she talks to bees,
She don’t talk to me.
Talks to the rainbows and to the seas,
She talks to trees,
She don’t talk to me.”
― Joey Ramone

“Eccentricity of behaviour is to be looked for when the intellect is lively and original, and above all when it is explosive and creative. Eccentricity, indeed, is invariably present in men of real distinction, and invariably absent in the mere money-grubber.”
― Anthony Rolls, Scarweather

“In a famous passage, Mill explained

Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

Yet, ironically, Mill himself could not tolerate unconventional men such as Comte, who often referred to himself as an 'eccentric thinker.”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume II

“In sex, in towel wringing, in dishwashing, as in everything else, he was exactly himself. If being exactly yourself meant you had to suffer the loneliness of being unlike anyone else, he seemed not to mind. The insularity of his lifestyle cradled him.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“I love women more on canvas than real life, for they seldom change on canvas!” ”
― Ramana Pemmaraju

“He had never owned a car. He biked or hitchhiked where he needed to go. He had recently turned against the word should, and doing so had made him a happier person. He found the market economy and it's anonymous exchange boring. He'd like to imagine a farm where no money changed hands, only goodwill and favors. He had a theory that you had to start out by giving stuff away- preferably big stuff, worth, he figured, about a thousand dollars. At first, he said, people are discomfited by such a big gift. They try to make it up to you, by giving something big in return. And then you give them something else, and they give you something else, and pretty soon nobody is keeping score. There is simply a flow of things from place of excess to place of need. It's personal, and it's satisfying, and everyone feels good about it. This guy is completely nuts, I thought. But what if he's right?”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“In life, like art, there has to be an essential sense of weirdness.”
― Jo Brunini

“I could be embarrassed or I could be eccentric. I picked eccentric.”
― Arthur Yeomans, No Ordinary School