Form Over Substance Quotes

#1. Worthiness is what gives meaning and fulfillment. Success without fulfillment is empty. That's like good looks without goodness. In life we need substance over form, not form over substance.

Shiv Khera

#2. In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being "in love" while discounting the importance of loving. (206)

Thomas Lewis

#3. Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.

Max Bill

#4. I am like the water that runs over me, immune to permanence, recycling endlessly. I am water; I am life. The form may change, but the substance stays the same. Strike me down and I will rise again. Vincit qui patitur.

Rick Yancey

#5. Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.

Asger Jorn

#6. Sex and love are like tea and milk. They can be mixed or they can be taken straight. Each has certain distinctive characteristics, but when they are combined they form a unique substance.

Joyce Brothers

#7. Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#8. The form of institutions and philosophies may change; but the substance that underlies them remains indestructible, because the nature of humanity remains unaltered.

Aldous Huxley

#9. Mere form without substance must collapse of its own weight.

Clarence Manion

#10. The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

Victor Hugo

#11. Almost all people suffer some form of intense inner pain at some times in their lives. The suffering might be depression, anxiety, substance abuse, or suicidal thoughts and it results from the battles we wage against our thoughts as we futilely try to get rid of our historie.

Steven C. Hayes

#12. The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.

Gertrude Atherton

#13. Your past is your shadow. It has form but no substance, except in the places you allow it to touch you. (

Tananarive Due

#14. In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#15. To make use of your mind to think conceptually is to leave substance and attach yourself to form

Huangbo Xiyun

#16. The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income.

Dee Hock

#17. Form can only be destroyed accidentally, i.e., on account of its connexion with substance, the true nature of which consists in the property of never being without a disposition to receive form.

Maimonides

#18. Preparing citizens to act thoughtfully to create a more just, open, and creative society gives form, substance and meaning to often abstract concepts of freedom and democracy.

Gregory S. Prince Jr.

#19. Grit is the grain of character. It may generally be described as heroism materialized,
spirit and will thrust into heart, brain, and backbone, so as to form part of the physical substance of the man.

Edwin Percy Whipple

#20. Some news managers have been slow to grasp that good television news is always substance over form.

Jessica Savitch

#21. Beyond the edge of the world there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

Haruki Murakami

#22. Love is form, and cannot be without
important substance

Charles Olson

#23. Preserve substance; modify form; know the difference.

Dee Hock

#24. There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured,
is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.

Henry David Thoreau

#25. Protein bars, protein flapjacks, protein granola, protein ice cream and protein coconut water ... To look at the health-food aisles, you'd think that protein was a substance no one could overeat. Even bread now comes in protein-enriched form.

Bee Wilson

#26. Creative power is that receptive attitude of expectancy which makes a mold into which the plastic yet undifferentiated substance can flow and take the desired form.

Thomas Troward

#27. Form may be of more account than substance. A lens of ice will focus a solar beam to a blaze.

George Iles

#28. Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science).

Paul Tillich

#29. Blood and flowers were alike, Isao thought, in that both were quick to dry up, quick to change their substance. And precisely because of this, then, blood and flowers could go on living by taking on the substance of glory. Glory in all its form was inevitably something metallic.

Yukio Mishima

#30. Man's shortcomings and sins are all due to substance of the body and not to its form, while all his merits are exclusively due to his form.

Maimonides

#31. Briefly summarising, we can express the proposed law thus: consciousness is bound up with learning in organic substance; organic competence is unconscious. Still more briefly, and put in a form which is admittedly rather obscure and open to misunderstanding: Becoming is conscious, being unconscious.

Erwin Schrodinger

#32. If love is a form of substance abuse, I hope to die high.

Crystal Woods

#33. Everything is substance plus name and form. Name and form come and go, but substance remains ever the same.

Swami Vivekananda

#34. If you are going to say a thing the substance of which is a big pill for your readers to swallow, there is no use in frightening them at the beginning by the form.

Ethel Lilian Voynich

#35. He who says he hates all kinds of flattery, and says so in earnest, has undoubtedly not as yet become acquainted with all kinds of it, whether in substance or in form.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#36. Facts of experience are valued in Zen more than representations, symbols, and concepts-that is to say, substance is everything in Zen and form nothing.

D.T. Suzuki

#37. Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.

Yves Klein

#38. Change affects only the form of a thing, not its substance.

Dharma