“If they give you lined paper, write the other way.”

Encouraging independence and originality against convention · Conversation / anecdote (commonly attributed)

• Convention
• Originality
• Writing

“To me, the trying part is being a woman at all. I've come to the ultimate conclusion that I'm a misfit of the worst kind, in spite of a superficial femininity.”

Frustration at the clash between daring mind, greed for experience, and convention · Letter to Helen Coleman, 29 December 1919

• Convention
• Identity
• Women

“Whitman fought for the modern point of view which has discarded chastity as the perverted ideal of Asiatic mysticism.”

Shows Masters's admiration for Whitman's challenge to inherited conventions surrounding the body and sexuality · Whitman

• Body
• Convention
• Freedom

“Next week I shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend.”

Mocking the disproportionate importance society can give to fashion · Letter to Cassandra Austen, 27 October 1798

• Convention
• Happiness
• Humour

“An incalculable amount of specious sentiment has been lavished upon daybreak, chiefly by poets who breakfasted, when they did breakfast, at mid-day.”

Teasing poets for celebrating dawn more enthusiastically in verse than in their daily habits · Essay, On Early Rising, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Convention
• Humour
• Poetry

“I always thought the fringe had the best of it. I don't think I mind not being woven in.”

A witty defence of independence from conventional expectations · Conversation, 1910

• Convention
• Independence
• Wit

“The conception of what it is that constitutes the lyric scope has, if anything, petrified.”

Criticising the narrow conventions that had come to limit lyric poetry · Essay, Narrative Poetry and the Vestigial Lyric, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Convention
• Poetry

“In the end one is too much a creature of nerves to possess the soldierly virtues which popular convention takes for granted and which perhaps really do exist.”

Original: Schließlich ist man doch zu sehr Nervenmensch um die Soldatentugenden zu besitzen, die der populären Convention als selbstverständlich gelten und die es vielleicht auch einmal da gibt. — A deeply personal rejection of conventional expectations of military heroism · Letter to Thea Sternheim from the front, early October 1914 (German)

• Character
• Convention
• War

“Every new fad or fashion at once has its denouncers from the pulpit, platform, professor's chair.”

Observing society's quickness to criticise novelty · Essay or column (commonly attributed)

• Convention
• Criticism
• Society

“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”

A historically revealing statement of the gender conventions surrounding literary ambition in his period · Letter to Charlotte Brontë, 12 March 1837

• Convention
• Literature
• Society

“The mass of mankind hate innovation: they hate to unlearn what they have learnt wrong, and they hate to confess their ignorance by submitting to learn anything right.”

Observing how pride and habit can make people resist new understanding · Letter to Walter Savage Landor, 20 May 1808

• Change
• Convention
• Learning

“As a model of what may and may not properly be said or written on any subject, Shakespeare will always be good enough for me.”

Invoking Shakespeare as his standard against restrictive literary convention · The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas, 1929

• Convention
• Literature
• Writing

“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible.”

Arguing that originality should come from the writing rather than typographical novelty · Letter, 15 May 1925

• Convention
• Style
• Writing

“But the really great writer is not bound by the conventions of his day, nor, if he desires to give his reader a happy ending, need he select a wastrel like Jones as the recipient of his too easily bestowed favours.”

Great writers need not surrender their artistic judgement to contemporary convention · The English Novel

• Art
• Convention
• Writing

“I don't think I should have been a respectable lady if I'd lived in them days. I'd have gone off with anyone who looked like that. Daphne was a fool.”

Playful revolt against respectability after quoting Swinburne on Apollo · Letter to Helen Coleman, 4 August 1910

• Convention
• Desire
• Rebellion

“The fate of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by showing how extremely dangerous it is.”

Turning a familiar proverb upside down by considering events from the worm's perspective · Essay, On Early Rising, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Convention
• Humour
• Wit

“After Racine, the game grew stale. It lasted two thousand years.”

Original: Après Racine, le jeu moisit. Il a duré deux mille ans! — His deliberately provocative judgement expresses impatience with inherited poetic conventions. · Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 (French)

• Convention
• Criticism
• Poetry

“Language expands when the imagination refuses to be bounded by convention.”

Original: تتسع اللغة عندما يرفض الخيال أن تحده التقاليد — A defense of poetic innovation and freedom · Literary reflection (Arabic)

• Convention
• Imagination
• Language

“I decline to go on sticking to the convention which has hitherto forced me to suppress the truth.”

Declaring his intention to speak openly despite prevailing convention · The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas, 1929

• Convention
• Freedom
• Truth

“The natural is boring.”

Original: Le naturel est ennuyeux. — A deliberately provocative challenge to the common assumption that naturalness is automatically desirable. · Mauvaises pensées et autres (French)

• Art
• Convention
• Style

“We usually fit our judgments not to the truth of things nor even to our own impressions of things, true or false, but to the standard of convention.”

Warning that social convention can replace independent judgement · Introductory Lecture, University College London, 1892

• Convention
• Independence
• Truth

“I am no purist, nor can I understand how anyone can amuse themselves with that.”

Original: No me pago de purista, ni comprendo cómo hay quien se entretiene en eso. — Rejecting linguistic purity when it obstructs living expression · Preface, La guerra literaria (Spanish)

• Convention
• Language
• Style

“Custom is the plague of wise men and the idol of fools.”

Warning against blind conformity and unthinking obedience to tradition · Essay, Of Liberty

• Convention
• Independence
• Wisdom

“You are a teacher again. You told me that one owes a duty to Society; you are part of the teaching profession: you are keeping to the beaten track.”

Original: Vous revoilà professeur. On se doit à la Société, m’avez-vous dit; vous faites partie des corps enseignants: vous roulez dans la bonne ornière. — Rimbaud attacks conformity and the respectable social roles he believed constrained creative freedom. · Letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May 1871 (French)

• Convention
• Freedom
• Rebellion