Quotes About Formalism

#1. All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost complete stultification of independent though

Reza Aslan

#2. The Concerned Photographer produces images in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism.

Cornell Capa

#3. In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.

Edith Hamilton

#4. Form as a goal always ends in formalism. For this striving is directed not towards an inside, but towards an outside. But only a living inside has a living outside.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

#5. Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics

Werner Heisenberg

#6. In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on 'formalism.' There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovich's compositions and Prokofiev's were no longer to be played.

Mstislav Rostropovich

#7. Her concentration was gone, and last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent.

Ted Chiang

#8. We must grow out of religion. It is either bugaboo, formalism, or hysteria. Besides, what proof is there that "the churches" know more about "God" than the Cockney sentry on duty outside the camp? We have only their say-so.

Richard Aldington

#9. Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#10. We should bear the intelligence and taste of the architect or the gardener in how we shape the becoming of our self. Too much precision ("stringency") is simply misplaced, a formalism inappropriate to the kind of matter we have to deal with (and to be).

Kenny Smith

#11. In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.

Huston Smith

#12. Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

George Edward Woodberry

#13. It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child's interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.

Jerome Bruner

#14. Formalism is music that people don't understand at first hearing.

Sergei Prokofiev

#15. I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Charles Bukowski

#16. But it is certainly not possible to insist on one hand that the formalism is complete and to insist on the other hand that its application to 'the actual' actually demands a step which cannot be derived from it.

Karl Popper

#17. The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.

Willard Van Orman Quine

#18. 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

#19. We refuse to recognize problems of form, but only problems of building. Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result. Form, by itself, does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

#20. There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: 'You see,' he says, 'now that's formalism.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

#21. Before economics can progress, it must abandon its suicidal formalism.

Robert Heilbroner

#22. The exercises of our meeting are to be simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism.

Felix Adler

#23. Whereas discipline without discipleship leads to rigid formalism, discipleship without discipline ends in sentimental romanticism.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#24. The swing of art is circular, from form to formalism, from formalism to formlessness, from formlessness to form again.

Austin O'Malley

#25. If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

Antonin Artaud

#26. Martise, lower your knife. There are more than a few people eager to carve out my heart. You'll have to take your place in line.

Grace Draven

#27. God does not work salvation for fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin vigorously ... Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding place of justice; sin must be committed.

Martin Luther

#28. The human mind has a way of punishing itself for killing a fellow man. It remembers and relives the incident again and again.

Tom Clancy

#29. The public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.

Andre Gide

#30. Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.

Robert Bringhurst

#31. What we need to do is replace the entire tax code. I do not think it makes sense to say, 'Let's just grab money from, quote, the wealthy' ... The issue is the tax code's rotten and we should start truly over with a simple code that is fair and transparent.

Barry Diller

#32. A good practice carried to an extreme and worked in accordance with the letter of the law becomes a positive evil.

Swami Vivekananda

#33. A woman without perfume is a woman without a future.

Coco Chanel

#34. She had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

Vladimir Nabokov

#35. Ignorance plays the chief part among men, and the multitude of words.

Diogenes Laertius