Form Quotes

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form" states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“You are not limited to this body, to this mind, or to this reality—you are a limitless ocean of Consciousness, imbued with infinite potential. You are existence itself.”
― Joseph P. Kauffman, The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom

“One of the strangest things is the act of creation.

You are faced with a blank slate—a page, a canvas, a block of stone or wood, a silent musical instrument.

You then look inside yourself. You pull and tug and squeeze and fish around for slippery raw shapeless things that swim like fish made of cloud vapor and fill you with living clamor. You latch onto something. And you bring it forth out of your head like Zeus giving birth to Athena.

And as it comes out, it takes shape and tangible form.

It drips on the canvas, and slides through your pen, it springs forth and resonates into the musical strings, and slips along the edge of the sculptor’s tool onto the surface of the wood or marble.

You have given it cohesion. You have brought forth something ordered and beautiful out of nothing.

You have glimpsed the divine.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Disciples and devotees…what are most of them doing? Worshipping the teapot instead of drinking the tea!”
― Wei Wu Wei

“There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“If there is one thing in mathematics that fascinates me more than anything else (and doubtless always has), it is neither ‘number’ nor ‘size,’ but always form.”
― Alexander Grothendieck

“Toutes les opinions ne se valent pas, et il ne faut pas confondre l'éloquence d'une parole avec la justesse d'une pensée.”
― Tzvetan Todorov, In Defence of the Enlightenment

“...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.”
― Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture

“Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.”
― John Fowles

“The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.”
― Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, The Palace

“Forms disappear, words remain, to signify the impossible.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.”
― Robert Hass

“The soul is the form of the body, but not as the shape of a statue is formatio et terminatio materiae, for form does not exist apart from material. There is no whiteness without a white object. But the soul is not a form in this simple sense, and in particular, is not the shape of the material it informs. Therefore, the shape of a being does not affect the being's soul, for then something lower would inform something higher, which is impossible.”
― Michael Flynn, Eifelheim

“What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion ---”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Man, as a form, bears within him the eternal principle of being, and by economic movement along his endless path his form is also transformed, just as everything that lives in nature was transformed in him.”
― Kazimir Severinovich Malevich

“If you ask today what art is, what its function is, what the meaning of art is and why one should create art, the answer given oftentimes by Western philosophers of art and those who special- ize in modern aesthetics is ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ The modern response is that you just create art for the sake of art; but this was never the answer of traditional civilizations where one created art for both the sake of attainment of inner perfection and for human need in the deepest sense—because the needs of man are not only physical, they are also spiritual. We are as much in need of beauty as of the air that we breathe.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, در جست‌وجوی امر قدسی

“A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“The hospital bulked darkly in the darkness.”
― William T. Vollmann, Poor People

“Every form is an image. Every image is a name. Every name is an attribute, every attribute a verb. Every verb forms the sentence to be read on Judgement Day, from the very Qur’aanulQariim that is found within the breastplate of all that is ‘created’ in the form of humankind. Every object be it animated or non-animated is an image!!”
― AainaA-Ridtz A R

“4. Radicalism of forms. If a new model once created meets with much success on account of its greater efficiency than its predecessor, it lends certain neighbouring forms a formal radicalism, which attempts to borrow from the appearance of the new form: for example, bronze tools that had reached the furthest development of their utility had a disastrous influence on stone tools, warping them toward an elegance that could only be attained in bronze. Today aviation has imposed its aerodynamic forms even on baby strollers and irons. This radicalism of forms is a result of the fact that people become bored when they do not find some unexpected element in the familiar. This radicalism might seem illogical, as the advocates of standardization believe, but we must not forget that discovery is only made possible by this need of humanity.”
― Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader

“Imagine dark. Imagine it's quality. This part is easy. Now try to imagine white in a way that the darkness forms a figure or a word you would like to remember.”
― Kushal Poddar, Poet

“Above all, it is choice. Pater is at all points an eclectic. Several times he insists upon the necessity of separating what is touched with ' intense and individual power' in a man's work from what has ' almost no character at all.' In art, in life, the best of whatever kind will delight him. He loves the spectacle of 'brilliant sins and exquisite amusements.' The strong, the magnificent, the saintly, the beautiful, the cruel, the versatile, the intense, the gay, the brilliant, the weary, the sad-coloured, everything but the dull, delights him. From religion, philosophy, poetry, art, Nature, human life, he summons what is rich and strange. He delivers it in choicest language because it has to be worthy of his own choicest moments of enjoyment. For here also he is an eclectic, ignoring the ordinary, the dull, the trite.”
― Edward Thomas, Walter Pater

“Mr Hobbes, in the preface to his own bald translation of the "Ilias," (studying poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late,) Mr Hobbes, I say, begins the praise of Homer where he should have ended it. He tells us, that the first beauty of an epic poem consists in diction; that is, in the choice of words, and harmony of numbers. Now the words are the colouring of the work, which, in the order of nature, is last to be considered; the design, the disposition, the manners, and the thoughts, are all before it: where any of those are wanting or imperfect, so much wants or is imperfect in the imitation of human life, which is in the very definition of a poem. Words, indeed, like glaring colours, are the first beauties that arise, and strike the sight; but, if the draught be false or lame, the figures ill disposed, the manners obscure or inconsistent, or the thoughts unnatural, then the finest colours are but daubing, and the piece is a beautiful monster at the best. Neither Virgil nor Homer were deficient in any of the former beauties; but in this last, which is expression, the Roman poet is at least equal to the Grecian, as I have said elsewhere: supplying the poverty of his language by his musical ear, and by his diligence.”
― John Dryden, Dryden

“The form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be.”
― Neil Postman

“1985 saw my first use of the spiral. It took me a long time to come to terms with this form, so evident in nature, and I still avoid the overblown spiral. I prefer that of the unfolding fern, which gives the feeling of endless growth.”
― Andy Goldsworthy, Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature

“And don’t look for me in a human shape.
I am inside your looking. No room
for form with love this strong.”
― Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“Form in poetry is the deepest and greatest colonialclassist invention - it is not a barrier to entry - it is an invalidation of human expression”
― Chauncey Alan Lewis

“Be not ordinary in a world where you were created by an extraordinary hand, in an extraordinary way, and for extraordinary reasons.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Sips And Little Portions

“Hike as much as you can. Mountains may differ in their form and structure, but they have a common effect; they leave us feeling different.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Coming to Grips with the Mountains and Valleys of This World