Blaise Pascal Quotes

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.

Society's the mother of convention.

In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Fashion is a social agreement. the result of a consensus of a large group of people.

We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

Custom is our nature …

… a country's laws are written upon paper, and that its customs are engraved upon brass. One may play with the one, but not with the other. It is less risky for a stranger to dance upon our Constitution in the public square than to affront one of our solidified customs. The one is merely eminently respectable, the other is sacred.

A code of behavior is an inevitable part of life in any community, and if we hadn't inherited ours, we should have had to invent one.

Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always.

The empire of custom is most mighty.

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Society becomes how you behave.

...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

I feel today's society is so judgmental.

Civilization has taught us to eat with a fork, but even now if nobody is around we use our fingers.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

because everybody lies. It's part of living in society .

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

So, "normal" is really what society dictates as normal and if we're born in that world, we would see that as normal. But if you think about it for a second, is it really?