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Eccentric Quotes

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Eccentric Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse. Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.”

“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.”

“Let's face it. We live in a command-based system, where we have been programmed since our earliest school years to become followers, not individuals. We have been conditioned to embrace teams, the herd, the masses, popular opinion -- and to reject what is different, eccentric or stands alone. We are so programmed that all it takes for any business or authority to condition our minds to follow or buy something is to simply repeat a statement more than three or four times until we repeat it ourselves and follow it as truth or the best trendiest thing. This is called "programming" -- the frequent repetition of words to condition us how to think, what to like or dislike, and who to follow.”

“Departures could be delightful. Pregnant with possibility. Perhaps this urge had something to do with having witnessed a very eccentric Professor father who would be so preoccupied with his internal life, these daily chores and routines just existed in the margins. One did not have to feed them, they had to feed one’s life- a life that added up to being more than a succession of everyday banal routines.”

“In war and other difficult enterprises in life, one can expect that people who possess useful skills will also display their share of eccentric habits, cruel behavioral traits, and bombastic personas. We can either shun such people or accept other people’s unusual behavioral actions in a nourishing perspective.”

“Yes, I advise wearing the silver gown that he sent,” he said plainly. “When one sends a gift, it is usually polite to make use of it. Of course, it may depend on the gift. For example, my third cousin three times removed—whom I know even less well than most of my family—once sent a poisonous frog as a gift . . . in the context of a pet and not usage as a weapon, I might add. In this instance, there was no use for the frog. But, in most cases, one does not receive poisonous frogs as gifts. And so, when the gift is indeed a gown and not a poisonous frog, one might follow the usual rules. Of course—”

“If we look at some of the most celebrated or prolific story originators of all time, we find among them a surprising number of eccentric bachelors and unmarried women. People who travelled widely, made strange friends and lived unusual and transient lifestyles.”

“She had poofy, teased-out brown hair that bounced off her shoulders with every high-flying skip and on her t-shirt was a spiraled sun with little wavy lines jumping off it to match the little wavy distortions in the air that were jumping off her. It was pure, unbridled energy and the sound of it hummed in his ears like when standing dangerously near a power transformer. Or maybe he was witnessing the origin story of the world’s first real superhero, and if so, she was probably going to draw her powers from the electromagnetic field itself.”

“Creativity is just about connecting things. A whole lot of nonsense put together, and diluted with a creative passion can eventually make sense. Keep thinking. Exploring. Keep trying out new ways and methods of doing things and just when you least expect, you may stumble on that next great world-changing idea that will make all the difference.”