Quotessence
Home / Topics / Eccentricity Quotes

Eccentricity Quotes

Browse 157 quotes about Eccentricity.

Related topics

EccentricPeopleIfsThinkingGeniusSelfMayBookMeanOriginality

Eccentricity Quotes

“Maybe I'm too crazy to be in a relationship," Henry said, which was his familiar response to Bobby's familiar discourse about the future. It felt like a grown-up thing to say, and like a difficult concession, and what he meant by it was I am trying as hard as I can and it's not enough for you or even Why can't my weak eccentricities be adorable to you, as yours are to me? But Bobby always heard it as a conversation stopper, childish and easy and glib.”

RelationshipsHonestyCrazinessEccentricityArguments
Book:The Great Night
Create image

“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.”

LoveNatureSadnessLonelinessOutsidersUnrequited LoveEccentricEccentricityOddball
Author:Joey Ramone
Create image

“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.”

KindnessSouthernEccentricityPat Conroy
Book:The Prince of Tides
Create image

“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.”

IdeasEnvironmentSelf EsteemFoolFood For ThoughtValueSelf WorthMessCurseInsultPessimismNegativityUnderestimateArenaIdeaEccentricNegative PeopleMichael Bassey JohnsonToxic PeopleMouthEccentricityFoolsInsultsCalumnyRuinStand OutExtortionUnderestimationDowngradingPeculiarityDetractorsInflammationMess UpCome OutDowngradePlaythingPlay DownUnderrateUnderrating
Author:Michael Bassey Johnson
Create image

“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.”

CharacterSocietyDangerIronyEccentricEccentricityMillComte
Book:Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume II
Create image

“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.”

EccentricEccentricityAccepting OthersDifficult PeopleEccentricsAccepting Others QuotesDifficult PersonEccentricity QuotesEccentricity And Attitude
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
Create image

“Balzac was pretty funny. His philosophy is plain and simple, says basically that pure materialism is a recipe for madness. The only true knowledge for Balzac seems to be in superstition. Everything is subject to analysis. Horde your energy. That’s the secret of life. You can learn a lot from Mr. B. It’s funny to have him as a companion. He wears a monk’s robe and drinks endless cups of coffee. Too much sleep clogs up his mind. One of his teeth falls out, and he says, “What does this mean?” He questions everything. His clothes catch fire on a candle. He wonders if fire is a good sign. Balzac is hilarious.”

NovelistsWritersEccentricityBalzacFrench Writers
Book:Chronicles, Volume One
Create image

“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—”

GiftsEccentricQuirkyEccentricityFrogQuirkiness
Book:Prince of Chandeliers
Create image

“We would never say to a man, "Be eccentric"; but if he cannot help being so, we would not have him be otherwise. The Leaning Tower of Pisa owes much of its fame to its leaning, and although it certainly is not a safe model for architects, we would by no means advise its demolition. Ten to one any builder who tried to erect another would create a huge ruin, and therefore it would not be a safe precedent; but there it is, and who wishes it was other than it is? Serve the Lord, brother, with your very best, and seek to do even better, and whatever your peculiarities, the grace of God will be glorified in you.”

UniqueOddGrace Of GodEccentricityIdiosyncrasiesTowerPisaLeaning
Book:Eccentric Preachers: Spiritual Lessons and Insights from God’s Peculiar People [Updated and Annotated]
Create image

“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.”

EccentricSurrealismEccentricitySpeculative FictionWhimsicalWhimsySurrealisticGenre BendingCross GenreGenre Blending
Book:The Subtle Cause
Create image

“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?”

FarmingEccentricityAnticapitalistAlternative LifestyleAlternative Economy
Book:The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love
Create image

“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.”

HumorHistoryVacationFloridaTourismEccentricitySpace ShuttleSpeechesDisney WorldOrange GrovesTourist Brochures
Book:Florida Roadkill
Create image