Jonathan Lear:
One symptom of our age is that we live with a caricatured conception of eccentricity. There is, of course, the absentminded professor combing a dusty study for the glasses which are sitting on top of his nose; there is the British eccentric of the nineteenth century, butterfly net in hand . . . etc. These distorted images disguise from us the fact that a true eccentric is simply someone who is moving in a different orbit from everyone else. A true eccentric is someone who has tried to determine what his desires and values are, to make them his own, and to live by them: by his very nature, an eccentric is not willing simply to conform to culturally given standards of “self-fulfillment.” Even if he ends up participating in a culture’s values — even if his orbit is a minor perturbation of tradition — he will make those values distinctively his own. The very idea that an eccentric is a deviation suggests that we are, by and large, concentrics.
Love and Its Place in Nature, p. 20.
or, Joe Moquin