It takes a lot of effort to depart from accepted customs. And yet, the first step towards perfection always requires such a departure.
What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
— Emerson
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers—under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. Such a life ruins both the soul and the body.
— Emerson
Society tells a person: “Think the way we think; believe what we believe; eat and drink what we eat and drink; dress the way we dress—or you’ll be damned.” If someone disobeys it, society turns his life into hell with its mockery, rumors, curses, boycott and ostracism. But take heart.
— Lucy Mallory
A person who follows his conscience and departs from the accepted customs of the environment in which he lives must be very firm and must watch himself very carefully: he will be blamed for his every mistake and weakness, and, above all, for reneging on the choice he has made.
When we, leading a virtuous life, are persecuted by evil people and have to bear their ridicule for sticking to our virtues, let us not feel sad and depressed. The nature of virtue is such that it usually arouses hatred towards it in evil people. Envious of those who want to lead a righteous life and wanting to prepare an excuse for themselves by blackening the glory of others, evil people hate those who are good, like those going in the opposite direction, and try to do everything to defame them. But do not let it distress you, because the hatred of evil people serves as a sign of virtue.
— John Chrysostom
It is wrong to irritate people by departing from their accepted customs, but it is even worse to depart from the demands of your conscience and reason by conforming to them.
