Rules are meant to be broken.

If you’re established in a craft or field, temporary rules may be useful to break a pattern. They can challenge you to become better, to innovate, and to bring out a new side of yourself or your work.

Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind

Rules are there for a reason. You are only allowed to break them if you are a master. If
you’re not a master, don’t confuse your ignorance with creativity or style.

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

Today they make a law and tomorrow they break it, and maybe it’s better that way. After all, no sooner does somebody promise to change his habits than he immediately falls into worse ones. It’s one thing to extol discipline and another to exercise it, and there’s a vast chasm between the saying and the doing.

THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules.

You have to make the rules, not follow them

One of the keys to being extraordinary is knowing what rules to follow and what rules to break. Outside the rules of physics and the rules of law, all other rules are open to questioning.

If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

Following the rules doesn’t create success; it just eliminates extremes