Top 100 Formative Quotes
#1. I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.
Herbie Hancock
#2. ...you can love some all you want, but you can't go into their past and become a part of their formative years.
Caroline Kepnes
#3. A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences.
Steve Albini
#4. If women's choices - such as taking time off to rear children - make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys' behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years?
Sendhil Mullainathan
#5. I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage.
James Laughlin
#6. A humankind abandoned in its earlier formative stage becomes its own greatest threat to survival.
Maria Montessori
#7. [Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes ... deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond.
Lionel Tiger
#8. Portugal was born in the shadow of the Catholic Church and religion, from the beginning it was the formative element of the soul of the nation and the dominant trait of character of the Portuguese people.
Antonio De Oliveira Salazar
#9. When I look back, I can say that the summer when I was 19 was a formative time for me. But at the time I just thought I was making tofu every night for dinner and going to work.
Zoe Kazan
#10. When I was young, I ran to see Astaire and Rogers, Huston, Lubitsch - they were formative for me. I also read 'Flash Gordon' when I was 6, but if I were still reading it when I was 16, I'd have been an imbecile.
Lina Wertmuller
#11. Future U.S. political leaders, those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me, may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost.
Robert M. Gates
#12. During those formative times, I really didn't know what was going on, and I was sort of torn in a thousand different directions with how I felt about what I was doing.
Ariel Pink
#13. My conscious life has all been in Kenya, and it's my point of reference. But going back to Mexico was very formative.
Lupita Nyong'o
#14. There's so much great stuff out there. The artists who've been most formative to me are the ones I've had the privilege to work with over the years.
Nick Blaemire
#15. The power which works through the formative principles of every religion in every country is manifested in the forms of religion ...
Swami Vivekananda
#16. A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now.
John Desmond Bernal
#17. Interest and enthusiasm are the wellspring of continually evolving community life: they create bonds which unite us whether we are young or old, nearby or far from each other; they allow human warmth and love to be the formative forces in personal and community life and striving.
Henning Hansmann
#18. They may have been rightly overbearing in her formative years, but they also loved Roselyn enough to trust she needed dreams more than realities.
Thomm Quackenbush
#19. It is mother's influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child's basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother's loving example to choose righteousness.
Ezra Taft Benson
#20. As Tozer expressed it, Human nature, as we know it, is in a formative state. It is being changed into the image of the thing it loves.
Anonymous
#21. A big reason why I'm not a big TV watcher is that in my formative years as a viewer, there wasn't that much great television on, or at least, television that appealed to me.
Jack Falahee
#22. It is true for everyone that the experience that society gives to us, or denies us, is profoundly formative.
Marilynne Robinson
#23. Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
Phil Klay
#24. The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength,
Sharon Salzberg
#25. The exercises of practical life are formative activities, a work of adaptation to the environment. Such adaptation to the environment and efficient functioning therein is the very essence of a useful education.
Maria Montessori
#26. If Obama came by his liberalism in the faculty lounge, then sure, he can see it hasn't worked, and he can modify it. But if Obama got his formative ideas when he was very young, and if they are the result of his traumatic relationship with his father, then they are built into his psyche.
Dinesh D'Souza
#27. Whether or not you agreed with the group's incendiary style, one thing most people will agree on: N.W.A had a deep, trans-formative and lasting effect on hip hop ideology.
Carlos Wallace
#28. In constructing our narratives, we identify which particular events or experiences were formative or transformative. In telling our stories, we also claim some authority over our own experiences and their meanings.
Peg O'Connor
#29. This grant gave me more than memories; it gave me a crucial experience that is formative to all writers: the ability to perceive that we become writers in exile, where what we write is the only link across distance and time ... I became a Maryland writer because the community of Juneau took me in.
Paula Vogel
#30. Formative commendation to the author as an altar boy: "You're the only one we've got to anticipates what's coming.
John Kasich
#31. You're always looking at last year, or 10 years ago, or your school days, or your teenage years, your formative years. Because that's exactly what they are, they're your formative years.
Paul McCartney
#32. Start-ups often die in the first 18 to 24 months because of formative mistakes, like choosing a bad co-founder or the wrong corporate entity or an inappropriate platform. Ninety percent of the companies the Founder Institute has created are alive because we've helped them avoid those mistakes.
Adeo Ressi
#33. Everyone has an idea over time of what the business should be, and during the formative period, too many opinions could be disruptive.
Nick Woodman
#34. My doctor felt that the main contributing factor was so many years of malnutrition, especially during my formative years, even before I got into modeling.
Carre Otis
#35. It's not a deliberate thing. It's not like I was rejecting the UK, which is what the papers said. It's just that when you spend a lot of time in your formative years around an accent, you're going to pick it up. I had been living in LA for a bit and that's what happened.
Joss Stone
#36. My dad, who is a heart surgeon, works with many adult patients who did not take good care of their bodies in their formative years. He is able to teach them how to break old eating and exercise habits and reshape their bodies, but not without a great deal of resistance.
Daphne Oz
#37. They say the music you listen to in your formative years stays with you and leaves an impression for the rest of your life. For me, the things that I fell in love with happened in the '70s, when artists were nurtured by record companies and it wasn't about singles.
Nikki Sixx
#38. My father was a man of the theater. I grew up in a theater family. As a young man, as a boy, I gypsied around with my siblings and my parents to, like, eight different towns, went to eight different schools. All those things were extremely formative, and I think that's what happens.
John Lithgow
#39. I was fortunate to work with Corigliano for a few years in the mid nineties. Meeting and working with him during those formative years was an important experience.
Michael Hersch
#40. I look at the bird in the cage and see the air, not only the air that is around the bird when it flies, but I see and feel the formative tendency of air in its form. When I do all this, then what lives in the forms becomes enlivened and spiritualized for me.
Rudolf Steiner
#41. Maybe deep down inside we were all still in our formative years. Maybe it was never too late for any of us to change.
Claire Cook
#42. I think Woody Allen calls it 'anxiety of influence.' When you're in your formative years and you watch a movie that makes you want to make movies ... For Wes Anderson, it's Truffaut. I'm sure for P.T. Anderson it was Scorsese and Jonathan Demme.
Max Winkler
#43. The combination of Federalism and Republicanism which formed the substance of the system, did not constitute a progressive and formative political principle, but it pointed in the direction of a constructive formula.
Herbert Croly
#44. My mother's records were formative for me, but when I became a teenager, I wanted to find songs that she wasn't hip to. She was so hip, though, that I had to go outside rock n' roll - so for about 10 years, I only listened to hip-hop, house and techno.
Jenny Lewis
#45. My dad was very fun and very adventurous, and from a formative age I learned to value men who would do things on a whim.
Rachel Hunter
#46. I think Chicago people are very special people, and the Midwest's confluence of East Coast-meets-Midwest sensibilities had to, on a formative level, inform me as an artist and an actor. In that sense, it had to have helped me.
Daniel Sunjata
#47. Sometimes a simple, almost insignificant gesture on the part of a teacher can have a profound formative effect on the life of a student.
Paulo Freire
#48. Suicide was such a formative band for me, so influential in the development of my taste. They're one of those bands that operated in absolute isolation for so long that they developed a completely unique world view.
Steve Albini
#49. Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth.
Gerhard Richter
#50. The funniest thing is not who influenced me positively, but who influenced me negatively. I had such an aversion to what Busby Berkeley did; in my early formative years, I thought it was terrible. Now, I think it's wonderful. But then, I wanted to do anything but what Busby Berkeley did.
Stanley Donen
#51. Islam is in a formative period struggling to consolidate the vast reach won by both inspiration and force at its founding. Two centuries along, the faith of Muhammad hangs like an intricate veil: a religion still searching for institutional wholeness, a set of lessons to live by.
Ron Suskind
#52. There were never any doctors in my family. But my grandparents and my mother had a strong social conscience that was formative.
Robert Winston
#53. I have very fond memories of the '80s; they were very formative years for me. I certainly remember the Cold War. It was a closer doorstep for the Brits than the Americans, so it was a very real and palpable threat at the time.
Matthew Rhys
#54. I wouldn't be where I am, if not for Jamaica. My formative years were here. I wouldn't have the confidence that I have if I wasn't born here, because growing up here I knew I could become anybody I wanted to become. There was no ceiling on top of me.
Michael Lee-Chin
#55. It's particularly important as parents in our conversations with our daughters and our sons to consider ideas intimate justice when we talk about and set them going on their early formative experience.
Peggy Orenstein
#56. You could spend the rest of your life trying to outlive the scars that are left by what you go through in your formative years.
Todd Edwards
#57. I Lived on the street when i was a kid, i wasn't even at school, so i had a whole different set of experiences for those formative years. I was gone ... i was in a very precarious place when i was younger.
Jared Leto
#58. A moment's reflection shows that Liberalism is entirely negative. It is not a formative force, but always and only a disintegrating force.
Francis Parker Yockey
#59. Flying was certainly formative for me; I have a deep and lasting ease with it as a result.
Michael Light
#60. Other than life experience, nothing left a deeper imprint on my formative self than the movies.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#61. I read a lot of the 'Pern books' growing up - basically up through 'All the Weyrs of Pern,' maybe a couple after that. As far as formative dragon influences are concerned, she's probably one of the top ones; I know I read other fantasy novels that had them, but none particularly stick in mind.
Marie Brennan
#62. The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.
Jacques Lacan
#63. Once I became historically aware, I realized there are these formative moments of history tied around tragedy and disaster and sacrifice, that led people to survive and take stock and move on with some kind of notion of betterment.
Fred D'Aguiar
#64. To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.
Dennis Prager
#65. I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
John Irving
#66. I can be a woodsman if need be. I grew up very close to some forest, and I spent a lot of my formative years up and down trees, fooling around in the woods. I'm no stranger to that sort of landscape.
Alex Turner
#67. A general curiosity about the unknown sparked by the multicultural milieu in which I spent my formative years. There was a lot of unknown back then, too. I dare say it was easier to be an explorer then.
Herodotus
#68. I don't consider Los Angeles home anymore; ultimately, it was pretty negative, but I did spend my formative years in the Valley and all around L.A. proper. Through my teenage years and into my young adulthood, up until the age of 30, I spent a good amount of time there.
Patrick DeWitt
#69. I think the years I have spent in prison have been the most formative and important in my life because of the discipline, the sensations, but chiefly the opportunity to think clearly, to try to understand things.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#70. It is in the province of home and society that woman has fashioned the customs. Here, women's approval and disapproval, wishes and wants, have been quite as formative and reformative as the action of the sea on the mainland.
Ellen Key
#71. I read too many romance novels during my formative years. I have a penchant for romantic comedies. I understand why 'Romeo and Juliet' came to such a pass.
Roxane Gay
#72. I would have been about seven years old when the formative years of my competitive football education began. I was playing in the local leagues around Manchester, playing against lads from tough areas who had been taught they had to fight for everything.
Gary Neville
#73. Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.
Charles Hazlewood
#74. Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with 'Loony Tunes'), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
#75. I absolutely loved my time at 'Brothers & Sisters,' what I learned and everything that went with it. It was an incredibly formative time for me.
Matthew Rhys
#76. Never can a reforming sect survive if it is only reforming; the formative elements alone - the real impulse, that is, the principles - live on and on.
Swami Vivekananda
#77. When the cook tastes the soup, that's formative: when the guests taste the soup, that's summative.
Clare Landrigan
#78. My first pilot gig, in fact my first job in television, was 'Freaks and Geeks,' and the experience of directing that pilot was probably the single most formative of my directing life.
Jake Kasdan
#79. collaborative teams think of common formative assessments as academic scrimmages or dress rehearsals.
Robert Eaker
#80. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.
Ben Okri
#81. Church is not meant to be fun. It's meant to be formative.
Matt Chandler
#82. All this has been very formative in both my research and my teaching, so I value it enormously in my life. It's why I'm a strong proponent of general education
because I saw how it opened my eyes.
Paul Rozin
#83. The general disinclination of Spain to accept slaves from Islamicized regions of Africa during the formative years of Hispano-American society had enormous consequences for the development of music in the New World.
Ned Sublette
#84. The reason I make movies now has a lot to do with having seen Star Wars when I was seven years old. That's the formative movie-going experience of my life.
Chris Weitz
#85. These ecstatic moments of delight or fear, or both, "radioactive jewels buried within us, emitting energy across the years of our lives," as Chawla eloquently puts it, are most often experienced in nature during formative years.
Richard Louv
#86. We must understand how we responded to formative trauma and how that response is perpetuated today. Otherwise, we will remain stuck in self-defeating attitudes and behaviors, all the while blaming them on someone else.
Russell Willingham
#87. High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.
Steve Aoki
#89. I'm an obsessive musical theatre person, so some of the most formative albums for me were, you know, the 'Phantom Of The Opera' soundtrack or 'Into The Woods.'
Allison Williams
#90. I grew up in Louisiana and spent my formative years there. There's a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all.
Nic Pizzolatto
#91. I was involved in music, acting, and some running, but my firm wish was to become a doctor. That was the formative age when I had decided on the pattern of my career.
Roger Bannister
#92. The ancient writers were not merely convinced of Moses' existence: they saw him as one of the formative figures of world history.
Paul Johnson
#93. Ever since, Kovai had been a trusted companion in her life who brought frolic, magic and romance to her formative years; a silent witness to her tales of joy and sorrow who was never reluctant to offer a shoulder to cry.
Neetha Joseph
#94. I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.
Ernest Cline
#95. O mighty and once living instrument of formative nature. Incapable of availing thyself of thy vast strength thou hast to abandon a life of stillness and to obey the law which God and time gave to procreative nature.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#96. The interpretation of a case is corroborated only by the successful continuation of a self-formative process , that is by the completion of self-reflection , and not in any unmistakable way by what the patient says or how he behaves
Jurgen Habermas
#97. In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is nonetheless a living being
Nikola Tesla
#98. Leonard Bernstein was probably the most significant formative influence on me - he was such an encompassing musician. I spent my teenage years absorbing him, and my other interests stemmed off of that. Bernstein led me to Sondheim and to Gershwin, and Sondheim led me to listening to Joni Mitchell.
Jason Robert Brown
#99. The first decade of your life is really important; it's formative.
Viggo Mortensen
#100. I have great parents, and they both taught me great things, but my formative years were boundaryless.
Roseanne Barr
