Formal Quotes

1. "Skyla's back," he continues, "and before she's formally charged with yet another homicide, a few things are going to change around here. For one, your mother and I will be around the house more often because we no longer have to babysit that linebacker your sister tried to force feed her Michelins."
Author: Addison Moore

2. "The questioning is a stupid formality aimed exclusively at preventing us from speaking at the demonstration."
Author: Alexei Navalny

3. "All young people believed they were immortal, and he had personal experience of the methods they used to cull themselves - base-jumping, sky-diving, hard drugs, alcohol. Over the years he'd come to see solid sense in the ways so-called savage peoples formalised their rituals of manhood; without such regulation, young men seemed compelled to invent their own, even more lethal, rites of passage."
Author: Alison Fell

4. "We don't have butlers. Obviously we have people who look after the houses, but I try not to run things formally."
Author: Andrew Lloyd Webber

5. "Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one."
Author: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

6. "One such question revolved around the informal institution of black kids eating together in the cafeteria. I'm going to let you in on a secret: growing black children like to eat. In a majority-white school, they are often friends with other black people. This has been known to result in black kids eating together at the same table. While this terrorist cell–like activity is a perceived clear and present danger to some in the non-black community, the agenda at most of these nefarious, exclusive gatherings consisted of talking about classes, flirting, making fun of each other, and, oh, plotting the downfall of White America—but only on every third Tuesday."
Author: Baratunde R. Thurston

7. "Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there's no hierarchy."
Author: Barney Frank

8. "Just the usual formality before the chaos begins. Like playing the National Anthem before a Cubs game."
Author: Berkeley Breathed

9. "...in other spheres of Victorian Society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed in all black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, 'so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without concious intention."
Author: Catharine Arnold

10. "Thieves are not so bad, and killing wears all possible costumes. There is no death, no murder that is better than any other. If you can kill me, the manner hardly bears consideration. You want to kill your own father, and you think it will make your sleep easier for the next seventy years if you can say you did it honorably. But your honor is blackened by patricide, and no amount of high-sounding formalities will make it white again."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

11. "The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [...]."
Author: Clay Shirky

12. "He swallowed. "That wager. Did anyone succeed?"She stiffened slightly, and then her shoulders lowered in defeat. Now she did turn around. "Oh, Mr. Carhart." It was the first time she had spoken his name since he'd returned, and she imbued those few syllables with all the starch of sad formality. "As I recall, I vowed to forsake all others, keeping only unto you, for as long as we both should live."He winced. "I wasn't questioning your honor.""No." She put her hands on her waist and then looked up at him. "I merely wish to remind you that it was not I who forgot our wedding vows."
Author: Courtney Milan

13. "There was a time before youbut I can't remember it nowa time before your beauty and Iwere formally introducedI'm sure I lived without youbut I don't remember howcan't imagine living withoutthese feelings you've producedjust one glanceand my life was redrawnjust one wordand my vocabulary changedI asked the timeand you said 'what's the hurry?'you asked my nameand I almost forgot"
Author: David Levithan

14. "I need to have a quick wardrobe. Two or three blazers with dark gray pants, two pairs of jeans, two light blue shirts, a casual shirt, two pairs of shoes, one formal one not. Small accessories like Tod's Greca belt and our woven bracelets for a wild touch."
Author: Diego Della Valle

15. "Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award."
Author: Elfriede Jelinek

16. "As actors, we went where we wanted to, and the camera followed us: it was like having another person in the room. There was no formal structure to the process. It was very liberating."
Author: Emily Watson

17. "Vests are flair for men. It's one of the few ways men can accent themselves in a formal yet fun fashion."
Author: Eric Wareheim

18. "On the morning of a formal dinner, they started marking off 8, 16, 18, or 20 inch spaces using measuring tapes or rulers and placing cards noting the perfectly symmetrical and equidistant locations for the plates, linens, and so forth"
Author: Estella M. Chung

19. "We say that the most dangerouscriminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Comparedto him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heartgoes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; theymerely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wishthe property to become their property that they may more perfectlyrespect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; theywish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamistsrespect marriage, or they would not go through the highlyceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. Butphilosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect humanlife; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life inthemselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesserlives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much asother people's."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

20. "The picture had no flourishes, but she liked its lowness of tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that pervaded it. It spoke of the kind of personal issue that touched her most nearly; of the choice between objects, subjects, contacts—what might she call them?—of a thin and those of a rich association; of a lonely, studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached to-day; of a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; of a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together that the career appeared to stretch beneath it in the disposed vistas and with the ranges of steps and terraces and fountains of a formal Italian garden—allowing only for arid places freshened by the natural dews of a quaint half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood."
Author: Henry James

21. "Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother's white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines."
Author: Henry James

22. "All rational knowledge is either material, and concerns some objects, or formal, and is occupied only with the form of understanding and reason itself and with the universal rules of thinking, without regard to distinctions among objects. formal philosophy is called logic. Material philosophy, however, which has to do with definite object objects and the laws to which they are subject, is divided into two parts. This is because these laws are either laws of nature or laws of freedom. The science of the former is called physics, and that of the latter ethics. The former is also called theory of nature and the latter theory of morals."
Author: Immanuel Kant

23. "Yes, yes," he shut off her attempted objection. "You would have destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life. You would have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all life's values are unreal and false and vulgar." He felt her stir protestingly. "Vulgarity--a heart of vulgarity, I'll admit--is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture. As I say, you wanted to formalize me to make me over into one of your own class, with your class ideas, class values and class prejudices."
Author: Jack London

24. "Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. Informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route."
Author: Jay Cross

25. "Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward."
Author: Jim Butcher

26. "Girls think they're only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I'm going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him."
Author: John Green

27. "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."
Author: John McGahern

28. "I thought again how odd it was to be on formal terms with someone you had once permitted to lick your ears."
Author: Josh Lanyon

29. "I'd like to shower and change clothes," she said. "Would you mind waiting for me a half hour?" The question seemed to amuse him. "Not at all," he said with exaggerated formality. "Please take all the time you need." Michael watched her walk away. Did he mind waiting a half hour for her? Not at all. He'd been waiting years for her."
Author: Judith McNaught

30. "Da classe rica, à qual o uso do ópio inicialmente era formalmente reservado, este uso desceu até às classes inferiores, e o turbilhão não pode mais ser detido. Fuma-se ópio em todos os lugarem e sempre no Império do Meio. Homens e mulheres dão-se aesta paixão deplorável, e uma vez costumados à inalação, não podem passar sem ela, sem experimentarem horríveis contrações do estômago. Um grande fumador pode fumar oito cachimbos por dia, mas morre em cinco anos."
Author: Jules Verne

31. "Are not the gays who seek the right to marry, to formalise their commitment to each other, holding up a mirror to heterosexuals who are marrying less frequently and divorcing more often?"
Author: Malcolm Turnbull

32. "Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a "community organizer." I'm not sure that's progress--and it's certainly not "sustainable."
Author: Mark Steyn

33. "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."
Author: Mary Doria Russell

34. "I think also of my colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands, and feel that in some measure I am here as a representative of our small, informal, international fraternity."
Author: Murray Gell Mann

35. "Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

36. "What we require is not a formal return to tradition and religion, but a rereading, a reinterpretation, of our history that can illuminate the present and pave the way to a better future. For example, if we delve more deeply into ancient Egyptian and African civilisations we will discover the humanistic elements that were prevalent in many areas of life. Women enjoyed a high status and rights, which they later lost when class patriarchal society became the prevalent social system."
Author: Nawal El Saadawi

37. "Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone."
Author: Nick Harkaway

38. "The de-spiritualization of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet at once the most palpable and atmospherically powerful. Its counterpart is the informalization of spirituality - accompanied by its commercialization in the corresponding subcultures. The threshold values for these two tendencies provide the intellectual landmarks for the twentieth century: the first tendency is represented by sport, which has become a metaphor for achievement as such, and the second by popular music, that devotio postmoderna which covers the lives of contemporary individuals with unpredictable flashes of inner emergency."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

39. "As I stomped across the school grounds, all I could see was Cal sitting with my dad in some manly room with leather chairs and dead animals on the wall, chomping on cigars as my dad formally signed me away to him. They probably even high-fived."
Author: Rachel Hawkins

40. "While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap."
Author: Ray Kroc

41. "[Homeschooling]...recipe for genius: More of family and less of school, more of parents and less of peers, more creative freedom and less formal lessons."
Author: Raymond S. Moore

42. "But I'll try to immerse myself in as many of the formal characteristics of site as possible in the landscape."
Author: Richard Serra

43. "My mother, who was professional schoolteacher, was particularly concerned about our formal education and even went so far as to start a private school together with some other parents so that our intellectual needs would be met."
Author: Robert B. Laughlin

44. "I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought."
Author: Robert Darnton

45. "And really, a formal ceremony and a piecce of paper wasn't what made a marriage. It was the feeling bursting apart my chest-the overwhelming sensation that I'd been cleaved in two at birth, and, miraculously, I'd managed to find my other half. And even more miraculously, he felt the same."
Author: S.C. Stephens

46. "No father, no son, no mother, no daughter should get so busy that he or she does not have time to study the scriptures and the words of modern prophets. None of us should get so busy that we crowd out contemplation and praying. None of us should become so busy in our formal Church assignments that there is no room left for quiet Christian service to our neighbors."
Author: Spencer W. Kimball

47. "If you wouldn't mind coming with us, sir? I am arresting you now and will shortly make a formal charge at the station.' I was so happy, so blissfully, radiantly, wildly happy that if I could have sung I would have sung. If I could have danced I would have danced. I was free. At last I was free. I was going on a journey now where every decision would be taken for me, every thought would be thought for me and every day planned for me. I was going back to school."
Author: Stephen Fry

48. "Engineering is a jeans and hoodie culture, and sales is more formal."
Author: Susan Wojcicki

49. "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."
Author: Vivek Wadhwa

50. "Active creation is conceived as a transitive action in which there is always presupposed an object about which the agent is concerned; it is virtually but not formally transitive because it makes, not presupposes, an object."
Author: William Ames

Formal Quotes Pictures