Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.

Any fool can make a rule
And any fool will mind it.

What you see architecturally is what you get with personalities here. It's very much a sense of conformity. I became very unpopular because I dared to ask questions.

They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying.