Formal Quotes

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal. (Françoise Sagan)
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune. View quote
Jim Rohn
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. View quote
Albert Einstein
Those who marry God can become domesticated too it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word ''Love'' means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and ''Ave Maria '' like ''dearest'' is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night. View quote
Graham Greene
In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession. View quote
Alberto Giacometti
My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc. View quote
David Bohm
Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations... Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving. View quote
Henry Mintzberg
Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts - that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great. View quote
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes. (Mark Strand)
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! View quote
Roger Moore
I graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in Communications and left formal education behind. View quote
Sarah Zettel
Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance. View quote
Hendrik Willem van Loon
Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners. View quote
John McGahern
Every company has two organizational structures: The formal one is written on the charts; the other is the everyday relationship of the men and women in the organization. View quote
Harold Geneen
All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final. View quote
Hypatia
When I enrolled in college at age 19, I had a total of eight years of formal classroom education. As a result, I was not comfortable with formal lectures and receiving regular homework assignments. View quote
Philip Emeagwali
We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes. View quote
Chris Hedges
She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion,--when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent. View quote
George Eliot
There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals. View quote
Theodor Adorno
What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallizes into formal ideas but its earlier stages. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
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. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas. View quote
Ian Hacking