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You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!
--
The Portrait of a Lady, ch. LIV

 

Henry James

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At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work.
And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?

 

Florence Nightingale

 

If he [Job] had never known happiness, then the pain would not have overwhelmed him, for what is pain but an idea that the person knows nothing else does not have, but now it is precisely joy that has educated and developed him to perceive pain.” Then his joy became his own ruin; it was never lost but only lacking, and in its lack it tempted him more than ever before. What had been his eye’s delight, his eyes craved to see again and his ingratitude punished him by inducing him to believe it to be more beautiful than it had ever been. What his soul delighted in, it now thirsted for, and ingratitude punished him by picturing it to him as more delightful than it had ever been. What he once had been able to do, he now wanted to be able to do again, and ingratitude punished him with fantasies that had never had any truth. Then he condemned his soul, living, to be starved out in the insatiable craving of the lack. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, p. 117

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

No rebels shall be allowed to remain at Davis Mill so much as an hour. Allow them to go, but do not let them stay. And let it be known that if a farmer wishes to burn his cotton, his house, his family, and himself, he may do so. But not his corn. We want that.

 

William Tecumseh Sherman

 

I dare say that quite a few people have contemplated death for reasons that much later seemed to them to be quite minor. If we are to live in a world where a socially acceptable "early death" can be allowed, it must be allowed as a result of careful consideration.
Let us consider me as a test case. As I have said, I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.

 

Terry Pratchett

 

Even though you may have started out saying you wanted imaginative, novel ideas, the tendency to drift back into the conventional is powerful.

 

Tim Hurson