Top 100 A Formal Quotes
#1. The United States, obviously, has a great interest in helping to maintain peace and security in Europe, and we have a formal alliance, NATO, to do so.
Hillary Clinton
#3. DUEL, n. A formal ceremony preliminary to reconciliation of two enemies. Great skill is necessary to its satisfactory observance; if awkwardly performed ... deplorable consequences sometimes ensue. A long time ago a man lost his life.
Ambrose Bierce
#4. When a man tells a woman there is no chance of a formal, committed, long-term relationship, the only self-respecting response is to take him at his word and move on.
Lynn Coady
#5. Syd's strafing run at Florennes had been a feat of strafing skill. His cine-gun footage of the radar van was perfect. It showed radar operators diving out both sides of the brown box on wheels. Instead of congratulations, the Station Commander awarded him a $25 fine and a formal reproof.
R.J. Childerhose
#6. Even amid a state of open warfare, these law-abiding men felt obligated to issue a formal document, giving a dispassionate list of their reasons for secession.
Ron Chernow
#7. But there's always a Mass. It's not a formal Mass at all. We're sitting around her dining room table with wine and Eucharist and holding hands. It's very informal and small, but to me that's a wonderful way to have Mass.
Linda Vester
#8. I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don't have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct.
Jerry Lewis
#9. Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor.
Ursula Goodenough
#10. A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.
Howard Whitley Eves
#11. Mother, I spoke to the duke. He understands that this is not a formal meal. And he specifically told me that he was looking forward to a change of pace. He has no family himself, so he has never experienced anything like a Bridgerton family dinner." "God help us." Violet's face went utterly pale.
Julia Quinn
#12. #anks for the swim. You are a majestic swimmer," Simon said
as we neared the walkway to Wind Song.
"You talk a lot of crap, you know that?"
"I thank you for appreciating my verbal stylings," Simon replied,
with a formal bow.
Amanda Howells
#13. Marlon was more of a formal zoo director type.
Jim Fowler
#14. There is a formal poetry perfect only in form?the number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wantedthey come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle.
Carl Sandburg
#15. Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there's no hierarchy.
Barney Frank
#16. You know, there is no language of vegetables, which converts a cucumber into a formal declaration of attachment.
Charles Dickens
#17. Death realigns roles according to a formal order of importance.
Paolo Giordano
#18. I've never known anyone who has fallen into sin and been successfully restored by the formal church structure. Nor have I ever seen a formal church structure wisely deal with sin, enabling ministry to continue without interruption.
Ted Haggard
#19. The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy - and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational
Steve Allen
#20. I didn't get a high school diploma. I really didn't have much of an education, which left me open to educating myself throughout my life, without the limitations on intellectual curiosity a formal education can impose. I followed what interested me.
Elayne Boosler
#21. That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. I predict a long reign ahead of you. Years of being referred to as Your Majesty, Your Grace, Your Excellence, My Liege, My Queen, My Lovely." "I don't think that last one is a formal title," I said. "It should be.
Amanda Hocking
#23. I now knew a method of speaking and writing that - by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn't supposed to fail - sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.
Elena Ferrante
#24. The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.
John Searle
#25. Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#26. Architecture was the last of the major professions to devise a formal 'cursus honorum' before its practice could be undertaken.
Martin Filler
#27. Later, I would ask Shaya to help me compose a formal response to Katrice's letter, something a long the lines of I am the Thorn Queen. F*** Off.
Richelle Mead
#28. Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#29. Sarusawa Pond is a very special place, because the Emperor paid it a formal visit when he heard how one of the Palace Maidens had drowned herself there. 1 Thinking of Hitomaro's marvellous words 'her hair tangled as in sleep', there is really nothing I can add.
Sei Shonagon
#30. A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used.
David Gries
#31. A skilled observer might notice there was something his gaze avoided. The same way you avoid meeting the eye of an old lover at a formal dinner, or that of an old enemy sitting across the room in a crowded alehouse late at night.
Patrick Rothfuss
#32. It may be, too, that the task Heidegger sets for himself in Being and Time is in fact impossible. Heidegger's abandonment of the project one-third of the way through may itself be a formal indication of the impossibility of providing adequate philosophical terms for life as we live it.
S.J. McGrath
#33. I never knew what to say."
"Really? You seem comfortable enough with words."
"I have a formal and aesthetic relationship to words.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#34. Shirt collars are very important to me. Putting a very soft shirt collar with a formal suit doesn't work for me at all.
Ozwald Boateng
#35. The ADA was a landmark civil rights legislation. It was a bill of rights for persons with disabilities, a formal acknowledgement that Americans with disabilities are Americans first and that they're entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else.
Valerie Jarrett
#36. Vests are flair for men. It's one of the few ways men can accent themselves in a formal yet fun fashion.
Eric Wareheim
#37. Hope and God were buddies. Theirs was not a formal relationship steeped in ritual and tradition. It was more of a close yet casual friendship.
Augusten Burroughs
#38. And really, a formal ceremony and a piecce of paper wasn't what made a marriage. It was the feeling bursting apart my chest-the overwhelming sensation that I'd been cleaved in two at birth, and, miraculously, I'd managed to find my other half. And even more miraculously, he felt the same.
S.C. Stephens
#39. My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It's true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.
Edwidge Danticat
#40. Over the next two years UNICEF will focus on improving access to and the quality of education to provide children who have dropped out of school or who work during school hours the opportunity to gain a formal education!
Roger Moore
#41. The traditional way to use roses is in beds. These can be any shape and are an attractive, albeit conservative, choice for a formal garden. More exciting
Maggie Oster
#42. I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history, and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed.
George Allen
#43. We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum.
Philip Greenspun
#44. I've never approached classical music in a formal way, ever. I couldn't read very well. I'd have to play every piece and internalize it, almost as if I had written it myself.
Andrew Bird
#45. It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.
Richard P. Feynman
#46. I started working out, doing a formal workout right around 1980. That's when I really decided I needed to get in shape and it may have been because you just start to see a decrease - a change in your body.
Paul Stanley
#47. These kids were smart, they were enthusiastic, and they were young enough so that the schools hadn't destroyed all their interest in learning. They could still actually use their brains, which in Thorne's view was a sure sign they hadn't yet completed a formal education.
Michael Crichton
#48. Knowledge is not just the preserve of the educated elite. Just because someone has not had a formal education, that does not mean he does not have wisdom and common sense.
Vikas Swarup
#49. I photograph you every morning
In a cruel attempt to capture
A formal souvenir of what I love
Susan Rich
#50. During the 1970s and 1980s Gibson did use my likeness, but we never signed anything. This new Signature model is the first time we struck a formal written deal for a guitar with my name on it.
Neal Schon
#51. [To a woman whose cellphone rang during a formal meeting:] You'd better answer that. It could be someone important.
Queen Elizabeth II
#52. Jesus. We got it, dude!" Aiden says. "We all know we're Donavans. We don't need a formal adoption process or the official name change to tell us that. It's a given. Just take the vote, Shane.
K. Bromberg
#53. What gets me excited by the process of making art is how unrelated elements get fused, which is a formal process. The content is the easy part. Putting it together in a way that's cohesive is the challenge.
Jordan Wolfson
#54. We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.
Anne Enright
#55. I would love a sandwich,' said Tybalt, with enough gravity to make it sound like a formal proclamation. Resolved: that we will have ham and cheese sandwiches.
Seanan McGuire
#56. On the morning of a formal dinner, they started marking off 8, 16, 18, or 20 inch spaces using measuring tapes or rulers and placing cards noting the perfectly symmetrical and equidistant locations for the plates, linens, and so forth
Estella M. Chung
#57. He smiles. The smile is not sinister or predatory. It's merely a smile, a formal kind of smile, friendly but a little distant, as if I'm a kitten in a window. One he's looking at but doesn't intend to buy. I
Margaret Atwood
#59. Because I absolutely, positively cannot fuck you, Lola, he says like it's a formal declaration.
I furrow my brow and salute him, which makes him snicker.
Bianca Giovanni
#60. I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my loved ones, young and old, and at least once a year we get together for a formal family photograph.
Elliott Erwitt
#61. But to this day - I'm very literate now, I love to read, I read constantly - words don't resonate the way they do to a person with a formal education. They're like a maze, a puzzle that has to be opened up.
Lance Henriksen
#62. It was here one brilliant November midnight that Edward wrote a formal letter to Violet and Geoffrey Ponting declaring his ambition to marry their daughter, and did not quite ask their permission so much as confidently expected their approval.
Ian McEwan
#63. A formal and consistent theory of inductive processes cannot represent the operation of every human mind in detail; it will represent an ideal mind, but it will help the actual mind to approximate that ideal.
Harold Jeffreys
#64. Manners are just a formal expression of how you treat people.
Molly Ivins
#65. Once it's no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as a formal embodiment of a moral code, not as a free-standing substitute for it.
Mark Steyn
#66. I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.
Joyce Carol Oates
#67. The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.
Peter Greenaway
#68. A formal and orderly conception of the whole is rarely present, perhaps even rarely possible, except to a few men of exceptional genius.
Chester Barnard
#69. It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.
Hilary Putnam
#70. He handed me the keys. My hand closed over them. It felt like a formal investiture.
Charlaine Harris
#71. Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
Zadie Smith
#72. Since this was a formal undead gathering, there would be food - all kinds - drinks, dancing, and festivities, while those in power pondered whether or not to slaughter half the people around them. In other words, like a high-school prom.
Jeaniene Frost
#73. For Gore 2000, I was a formal campaign adviser: contrary to RNC mythology, my brief was not 'wardrobe,' but rather policy on women's issues, and messaging. I was also married to a Clinton speechwriter, and observed the message decision-making process from the perspective of a spouse.
Naomi Wolf
#74. There are many different aspects to a formal meditation practice. But the real meditation practice is how you interface with life from moment-to-moment, no matter what's happening. Especially when you are awake, which is pretty much most of the time except for deep sleep.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#75. Although China may be able to change the major power structure in the next ten years, it will be unable to shift the world from unipolarity to bipolarity unless it forms a formal alliance with Russia.
Wang Yizhou
#76. Those who are used to a clergy take very lightly those who do not have a formal divinity degree: like Paul and Peter and James and John.
Dallin H. Oaks
#77. You don't need a formal prayer or invocation to call the angels to your side. Simply think, 'Angels, please surround me,' and they are there.
Doreen Virtue
#78. The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#79. I don't have a formal home recording studio, but I can record tracks on my computer upstairs in my office.
Huey Lewis
#80. At a formal dinner party, the person nearest death should always be seated closest to the bathroom.
George Carlin
#81. While you don't need a formal written contract before you get married, I think it's important for both partners to spell out what they expect from each other ... There are always plenty of surprises- and lots of give and take-once you're married.
Muriel Fox
#82. The pilot, Wedge Antilles, once Red Leader and now - well, now something else, a role without a formal title, as yet,
Chuck Wendig
#83. Web projects aren't done until I'm happy, or someone changes the password to the server. A formal release does not stop me from working on it more.
Chris Milk
#84. To be an ally is a formal military alliance. And we have a formal military alliance in NATO. But we are partners with other countries all across the world. And they're - they will be a partner.
Joe Biden
#85. I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It's an interesting one and it's a permanent one; there's no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule.
David Hockney
#86. My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.
Jim Crace
#87. I don't think people should be fed mesclun salad and chicken breast. My grandmother would serve grits and oxtail stew at a formal dinner, and if you didn't like it, well then you ate more beans or you went home and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Marjorie Gubelmann
#88. The ideal of toleration sounds like a formal condition allowing all flowers to bloom, but it turns out on examination to adumbrate a determinate form of life no less intrusive than the Sharia or "fundamentalist" Christianity.
Kenneth Minogue
#89. Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths.
Douglas Hofstadter
#90. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#91. In a formal socialization, no one individual can stand without the other to rely on, regardless of the situation.
TOOTS888
#92. Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.
Mary Szybist
#93. 'SMiLE' is perhaps the Beach Boys' most legendary album. It was recorded in 1966 and 1967 but only saw a formal release in 2011. That's a long time to wait for what was said to be Brian Wilson's masterpiece.
Henry Rollins
#94. Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.
Barbara Kruger
#95. You said a formal dinner was where we dress up!" explained the little boy behind the monkey mask.
Michael Kroft
#96. One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#97. You've got to develop relationships. You can't do things just in a formal context.
Kenneth Chenault
#98. I remember that - you know, I didn't receive a formal education. I was educated in the Montevideo cafe, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of telling stories, storytelling.
Eduardo Galeano
#99. A formal education will give you knowledge; self-education will give you wisdom.
Debasish Mridha
#100. It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
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