Top 87 Quotes About Formality
#1. Maybe a captain more obsessed with strict protocol and formality would have been stalwart in hiding his feelings, but Riker didn't subscribe to such emotionally stunted ideals of manhood.
David W. Mack
#2. Grilling takes the formality out of entertaining. Everyone wants to get involved.
Bobby Flay
#3. What's happened - in our country, anyhow - is that the young people have shied away from the formality of the concert hall, that tie - and - tails philharmonic image.
Chuck Mangione
#4. In Russian administration, minuteness does not exclude disorder. Much trouble is taken to attain unimportant ends, and those employed believe they can never do enough to show their zeal. The result is ... that having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another.
Marquis De Custine
#5. Every member of our Church is a missionary. Without the formality of a setting-apart we should be so set-apart from the ways of the world that we can teach the gospel, which is our Father's way of life, by the very lives we live.
William J. Critchlow Jr.
#6. Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.
Lynne Truss
#7. polite with dignity, affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity,
Ron Chernow
#8. Courtesy should be apparent in all our actions and words and in all aspects of daily life. But be courtesy, I do not mean rigid, cold formality. Courtesy in the truest sense is selfless concern for the welfare and physical and mental comfort of the other person.
Mas Oyama
#9. First reach your target in your mind, then reaching your target in reality will just be a formality!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#10. House-training, I must tell you, is a formality that can elude young dachshunds for some time; this is particularly true in climates that affront their sensibilities with outrageous meteorological insults. Rain, for example, or a startling gust of wind.
Mary Doria Russell
#11. There was a certain graceful ease and freedom about all he said and did, that gave a sense of repose and expansion to the mind, after so much constraint and formality as I had been doomed to suffer.
Anne Bronte
#13. If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#14. Unfaithful in prayer, weak in the working of the Spirit, its witness to Christ a mere formality, and unfaithful to its worldwide mission - such are the marks of a powerless church.
Andrew Murray
#15. I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.
Emilio Estevez
#16. I am actually extremely casual in certain environments. But one of the reasons I like living in London, I like the formality of it, as compared to the formality of America - or informality. I like putting on a suit. I like putting on a tie.
Tom Ford
#17. We are all members of the same great family ... On social occasions the formality of strictly military occasions should be relaxed, and a spirit of friendliness and goodwill should prevail.
John A. Lejeune
#18. The priest raises his foot. In it he feels a dull, heavy pain. This is no mere formality. He will now trample on what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man.
Shusaku Endo
#19. Treat your business relationships like friendships (or potential friendships). Formality puts up walls, and walls don't foster good business relationships. No one is loyal to a wall ... except the one in China.
Steve Pavlina
#20. In love afairs, there is no mediator like a merry, simple-hearted child - ever ready to cement divided hearts, to span the unfriendly gulf of custom, to melt the ice of cold reserve, and overthrow the separating walls of dread formality and pride.
Anne Bronte
#21. She had never liked people who spoke too familiarly upon first meeting. There ought to be a little bit more formality.
Sergei Lukyanenko
#22. Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle ofyour character and aims.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card.
George Orwell
#24. Marriage is a formality, a legal bondage. Love is of the heart; marriage is of the mind. That's why I am never in favor of marriage.
Rajneesh
#25. The kiss was brief and gentle, scarcely more than the formality that concludes a wedding, yet as striking in its impact as though they had this minute plighted a troth.
Diana Gabaldon
#26. Documentation is not understanding, process is not discipline, formality is not skill.
Jim Highsmith
#27. I realize the blackness of sleep is circling my head. It's been there a while, biding its time and growing closer with each revolution. I give up on rage, which at this point has become a formality, and make a mental note to get angry in the morning.
Sara Gruen
#28. In the modern world there's no such thing as formality. A dinner jacket used to mean a tuxedo, you know?
Noah Emmerich
#29. I should not like to preach to a congregation who all believed as I believe. I would as lief preach to a basket of eggs in their smooth compactness and oval formality.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#30. Ritual is a terribly important, binding cement in a society. If we abandon formality and rituals, we're actually weakening the relationships that exist between people that bind.
Alexander McCall Smith
#31. The Toddstock thing is the closest thing, I have to say, a Grateful Dead sort of thing where it all lapses over from the formality of a concert into more of a lifestyle thing.
Todd Rundgren
#32. Bill Clinton will be our country's next President. The election later this year is just a formality. The result has already been decided.
James Morcan
#33. Our large age difference made us shy with each other; there was a formality, a generational reserve;
Donna Tartt
#34. If formality and courtesy take over the feelings . . . how silly and meaningless these things could become. And despite all this, I still take part in it!
Fumio Obata
#35. I despise formal restaurants. I find all of that formality to be very base and vile. I would much rather eat potato chips on the sidewalk.
Werner Herzog
#36. A wedding is the formality a man has to go through before going to work for a new boss.
Evan Esar
#37. I'm an American searching for some sort of parameters, a way of life - I'm looking for a slight formality, for a place where you can never be overdressed.
Waris Ahluwalia
#38. Every time a pundit or elected official is on any TV news program, it should be a polite formality to mention that GE has made such and such billions off the war in Iraq by selling arms or that Murdoch is a right-wing activist with a clear stake in who wins and who taxes his profits the least.
Adam McKay
#39. The water-dragon's name was Lady Kiyomizu, although much to Junichiro's horror she breezily told Laurence to call her Kiyo, and not to stand on formality. "You have no manners anyway," she said, "and there is no sense your trying to put out sakura blossoms, when you are a bamboo.
Naomi Novik
#40. At any rate, it is safer to leave people to their own devices on such subjects. Everybody likes to go their own way
to chuse their own time and manner of devotion. The obligation of attendance, the formality, the restraint, the length of time
altogether it is a formidable thing.
Jane Austen
#41. Woe unto thee if after all thy profession thou shouldst be found under the power of ignorance, lost in formality, drowned in earthly-mindedness, envenomed with malice, exalted in an opinion of thine own righteousness, leavened with hypocrisy and carnal ends in God's service.
Joseph Alleine
#42. The act of nutrition is not a purely physiological event ... The family meal is a formality that cultivates in us ... a capacity for sharing, generosity, thoughtfulness, a talent for civilized conversation.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#43. And Ellie, if Fin is offering his heart to you, it's just a formality because believe me when I say you already have it.
Rachel Higginson
#44. I am one of the five best parallel parkers in the United States of America. Dead serious. It's to the point now where I look back when pulling into the spot only as a formality.
Willie Geist
#45. I like to be able to wear something that is appropriate for wherever the day takes me: to work, on a hike and then out to dinner. I like to take the formality out of the day's schedule and be ready for any off-road detour.
Matthew McConaughey
#46. Strong fingers dig into my neck muscles, and I bite back a groan. "Oh, my God."
"Come on now. We're past that sort of formality. You can call me Liam.
Leisa Rayven
#47. There's a formality in academia that can't be ignored, even if a man is busy with other things, like trying not to die.
Randy Pausch
#48. Liraz may have captured Ziri's soul like a butterfly in a bottle, but that was only a formality. It was already hers.
And, clearly, judging by the state of her laugh-sobbing in Karou's arms, hers was his, too.
Laini Taylor
#49. How did you ask a man, "Oh, by the way, did you ask me to marry you the other day or were you merely suggesting I become your mistress?" Formality was the key to surviving this, she hoped.
Anne Gracie
#50. Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that there's a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life.
Suzanne Vega
#51. Miracles happen. But prayer is needed! Prayer that is courageous, struggling and persevering, not prayer that is a mere formality.
Pope Francis
#52. Just the usual formality before the chaos begins. Like playing the National Anthem before a Cubs game.
Berkeley Breathed
#53. Are not the daily devotions conducted by these legal ecclesiastics already degenerating into a scanty attendance, and a tiresome formality?
James Madison
#54. Formality Thus the absence of all mention of particular things or properties in logic or pure mathematics is a necessary result of the fact that this study is, as we say, "purely formal".
Bertrand Russell
#55. You two have sex every time you look at each other; sleeping together is just a formality you haven't gotten around to yet.
P.J. Tracy
#56. The questioning is a stupid formality aimed exclusively at preventing us from speaking at the demonstration.
Alexei Navalny
#57. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.
Jonathan Franzen
#58. To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.
Evan Osnos
#59. We've become much more casual and much more relaxed in social interactions, where there was a formality and maybe a kind of respect at that time that doesn't exist now.
Radha Mitchell
#61. Well I wasn't really attacking the religious beliefs, I was attacking the formality of the rituals of the Catholic church; however, people took it wrongly.
Tom Lehrer
#62. I like to introduce myself, because THEN I can get in all the facts." The usually self-deprecating John Hay on the ironic formality of signing his own commission as Secretary of State.
John Taliaferro
#63. It was not certain what significance the ceremony held ... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible
Mervyn Peake
#64. The sort of formality that goes into my artwork I would not expect from everybody in the world. I'm sort of pushing that point to its limit, in my mind, but I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with using a laptop so long as we have some understanding of how it works a little bit.
Tristan Perich
#65. It is in the very nature of conjugal love to be definitive. The lasting union expressed by the marriage vows is more than a formality or a traditional formula; it is rooted in the natural inclinations of the human person. For believers, it is also a covenant before God that calls for fidelity.
Pope Francis
#66. I dislike your formality." ... "Your formality keeps us at arms length when I want not even a hairbreadths between us.
Carolyn Jewel
#67. If you just live in New York and you only know New York, you know a certain kind of condition of formality and informality. By being able to go to another context and to be able to use that as a counter foil to the context you know, you are about to see a wider range.
David Adjaye
#68. In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.
Fanny Howe
#69. For Nautzera there was no present, only the clamour of a harrowing past and the threat of a corresponding future. For Nautzera, the present had receded to a point, had become the precarious fulcrum whereby history leveraged destiny. A mere formality.
R. Scott Bakker
#70. An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.
Vivek Wadhwa
#71. We educated people make a great display of humility when we meet, trying to get the better of each other in unimportance. It is usually only a formality, of course, a polite mask for our feelings of superiority.
John Spurling
#72. It is amazing how sharing of one's intimate details can make human beings forget the formality of a relationship and bring them closer together.
Ruchira Khanna
#73. Where light leaves the affections behind, it ends in formality and or atheism; where affections outrun light they sink into the bog of superstition, doting on images and pictures or the like.
Timothy J. Keller
#74. Rule, she's always been an Archer. Putting a rock on her finger is just a formality. No one doubts how much you care about her, or that you are committed to her and her alone. Screw her obnoxious family and whatever headache Mom and Dad might want to cause, your want her forever, ask her.
Jay Crownover
#75. There remained a strange formality between them, and her pleasure in his presence felt too much like missing him had felt during the last week.
Robin McKinley
#76. I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp ... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues.
Eric Clapton
#77. The formality that is left in the South now is quite dead and done for of course.
Flannery O'Connor
#78. In assisting his 'neighbour' every day to the best of his ability, and keeping truth, honesty, and kindness perpetually before him, the Boy Scout, with as little formality as possible, is pleasing God.
Robert Baden-Powell
#79. When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it's a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.
Erma Bombeck
#80. Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it.
E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl Of Halifax
#81. their stay when it was to take place with full formality.
Winston Graham
#82. Personally, my interest in social history ends around 1959, by which time I was an adolescent. I've always attributed this to my particular sensibilities. I like formality and elegance, and I'm fundamentally conservative.
Laurie Graham
#83. When thanksgiving is filled with true meaning and is not just the formality of a polite "thank you," it is the recognition of dependence.
Billy Graham
#84. In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.
Anna Quindlen
#86. The automatic use of Du, even to strangers if they were friends of friends, was very surprising. Sie, it seemed, meant relegation to the outer darkness and people had been known to fight with swords about the matter.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
#87. The sweetness of life lies in dispensing with formalities.
Muhammad Ali
