Formal Quotes - Page 25

• There are people who balk at small civilities on account of their manifest insincerity. ... It is better and more logical to accept all the polite phraseology which facilitates intercourse, and contributes to the sweetness of life. If we discarded the formal falsehoods which are the currency of conversation, we should not be one step nearer the vital things of truth.

  Agnes Repplier

  Sweetness Of Life, People, Steps

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• each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

  May Sarton

  Energy, Literature

  May Sarton (2015). “Writings on Writing”, p.6, Open Road Media

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• Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

  Cesare Pavese

  Class, People, Behaviour

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• Manners are just a formal expression of how you treat people.

  Molly Ivins

  Expression, People, Manners

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• What we tell students in formal schooling: “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years and all will be well.

  Alex Tabarrok

  Years, Students, Quiet

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• When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.

  John Ortberg

  Humble, Thinking, Self

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• A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

  Dana Spiotta

  Coherence, Satisfaction, Authenticity

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• I didn't need it [formal training], because I've got the best taste in the world.

  Manolo Blahnik

  Training, Needs, World

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• With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This is a very, very important achievement.

  Kwame Dawes

  Book, Writing, America

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• Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes.

  Rose Wilder Lane

  Sunshine, Sunday, Air

  "Old Home Town". Book by Rose Wilder Lane, 1935.

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• The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Life, Art, Perfection

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• Ardent
  yet chill and formal,
  how I ache
  to tempt a chisel
  as a sculptor.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Art, Chill, Ache

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.338, New Directions Publishing

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• Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.

  William Barrett

  Men, Hands, Greek

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• The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.

  Edgar Lee Masters

  Spiritual, Feelings, Essentials

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• True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all expectations, from the springtime hedge which seems already too full, while the purely formal imitation of varietyis but void and uniformity, that is, that which is most opposed to variety.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Real, Flower

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• Trying to apply formal methods to all software projects is just as bad as trying to apply code-and-fix development to all projects.

  Steve McConnell

  Trying, Development, Projects

  Steve McConnell (1999). “After the Gold Rush: Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering”

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• Why be formal when you can be fabulously feral? Why be conventional when you can be happy?

  Simon Doonan

  Conventional

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• Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

  Dana Gioia

  Art, Apology, Poetry

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• Without any formal personal finance instruction in our high school or college curricula, many college seniors who graduate in the red will continue to make common financial mistakes that only exacerbate their debt burdens.

  Alexa Von Tobel

  Senior, Mistake, School

  "Financial Education: The Solution for the Future of Our Economy?" by Alexa Von Tobel, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 22, 2010.

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• I loved New York. I made enough money and studied acting with Kenneth McMillan, which was my first formal training.

  June Squibb

  New York, Training, Acting

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• The rank of office is not what makes someone a leader. Leadership is the choice to serve others with or without any formal rank.

  Simon Sinek

  Office, Choices, Leader

  Simon Sinek (2014). “Leaders Eat Last Deluxe: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't”, p.66, Penguin

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