Quotations on Eccentricity

1. A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
- Nikos Kazantzakis

2. 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.
-John Stuart Mill

3. I was so upset yesterday that I made the blunder of throwing myself in the water. Fortunately, there were no bad results.
- Claude Monet

4. Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
- Edgar Allan Poe

5. Let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on.
- Charles Saatchi

6. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
- Bertrand Russell

7. People of uncommon abilities generally fall into eccentricities when their sphere of life is not adequate to their abilities.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

8. Only the other day I was inquiring of an entire bed of old-fashioned roses, forced to listen to my ramblings on the meaning of the universe as I sat cross-legged in the lotus position in front of them.
- Prince Charles

9. Eccentric people have these happy obsessive preoccupations, and a wonderful, unusual sense of humor, and this gives them a significant meaning in life. And they are far healthier than most people because of that.
- David Weeks

10. Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.
- Queen Elizabeth II

11. Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
- Dame Edith Sitwell

12. The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even, if you will, eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn't be happy with.
- Joseph Brodsky

13. The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
- John Stuart Mill

14. A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
- Robert Frost

15. So long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him -- pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?
- Laurence Sterne

16. I hope I'm becoming more eccentric. More room in the brain.
- Tom Waits

17. Adam was human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
- Mark Twain

18. When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
- Jonathan Swift

19. Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.
- Malcolm Muggeridge

20. What am I in the eyes of most people, a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person--somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody has in his heart.
- Vincent Van Gogh

21. The painter must be solitary. For if you are alone you are completely yourself, but if you are accompanied by a single companion, you are only half yourself.
- Leonardo da Vinci

22. True elegance is for me the manifestation of an independent mind.
- Isabella Rossellini

23. People who think unusual thoughts often lead lives different from the rest of us. Isaac Newton spent almost sixteen hours a day locked up in his rooms at Cambridge working on his ideas; he had lots of wild ones on cosmology as well as those that transformed physics.

If you spend too much time being like everybody else, you decrease your chances of coming up with something different.
- Robert Ornstein

24. Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
- Cecil Beaton

25. I'm from the Delbert Home for the Unusual.
- Jonathan Winters

26. I'm eccentric. I don't have much social life. I don't go out much. I'm on the shy side and I don't entirely feel rooted or at home or that I belong anywhere. I don't think I ever have. ...
The term 'eccentric' means 'off-center', and what I'm interested in, both in my patients and myself, is seeing whether one can establish a different center.
I think a life has to be centered, but I think it doesn't have to be the same center.
- Oliver Sacks

27. I had always loved and feared my own eccentricity. I admired the unusual, yet cringed at the outcast. I wanted to stand out, but needed to fit in... I came to realize that the more honestly I became myself, the less easily I could homogenize into all cultures and circles.
I couldn't look and be like everyone else and still stay true to myself. ... Go ahead and experiment and play. Become a character in your own story. Let new identities roar from the rooftops.
- Tama J. Kieves

28. Imagination is more important than knowledge
- Albert Einstein

29. They enjoy thinking. They enjoy being creative. They enjoy having ideas. Most people do not enjoy thinking at all.
- Edward de Bono

30. You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.
- Robin Williams