form

All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.

—Hazlitt,William

And all must love the human form, In heathen,Turk or Jew; Where mercy, Love and Pity dwell There God is dwelling too.

—Blake,William

Il ne faut pas toujours croire que le sentiment soit tout. Dans les arts, il n'est rien sans la forme. You must not think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.

—Flaubert, Gustave

The instruments of labour, when they assume the form of machinery, acquire a kind of material existence which involves the replacement of human forces by the forces of Nature, and of rule-of-thumb methods by the purposeful application of natural science.

—Marx, Karl Heinrich

Le beau n'a qu'un type; le laid en a mille. Beauty has only one form; ugliness has a thousand.

—Hugo,Victor Marie

Of all God's works, which do this world adorn, There is no one more fair and excellent, Then is mans body both for power and form, Whiles it is kept in sober government.

—Spenser, Edmund

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know onlya few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, byany confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but reallyconcurring, laws, which Thoreau we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

—Thoreau, Henry David

   An open place it was, and overlooked, From high, the sullen water far beneath, On which a dull red image of the moon Lay bedded, changing oftentimes its form Like an uneasy snake.

—Wordsworth,William

Il faut que la critique attaque la forme, jamais le fond de vos ide¤  es, de vos phrases. Arrangez-vous. A critic must attack the form, never the foundation of your ideas and phrases. See to it.

—Lautre¤  amont, Comte de properly Isidore Ducasse

God appears and God is light To those poor souls who dwell in night, But does a human form display To those who dwell in realms of day.

—Blake,William

Drawing is not the form; it is the way of seeing the form.

—Degas, (Hilaire Germain) Edgar

Le colonialisme ne se satisfait pas d'enserrer le peuple dans ses mailles, de vider le cerveau colonise¤   de toute forme et de tout contenu. Par une sorte de perversion de la logique, il s'oriente vers le passe¤   du peuple opprime¤  , le distort, le de¤  figure, l'ane¤  antit. Colonialismisnot satisfiedmerely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. Bya kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.

—Fanon, Frantz Omar

Every form is individual, there exists none which is abstract.

—Heinse,Wilhelm

'To every Form of being is assigned,' Thus calmly spake the venerable Sage, 'An active Principle:öhowe'er removed From sense and observation, it subsists In all things, in all natures.'

—Wordsworth,William

We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

Das moralische Urteilen undVerurteilen ist die Lieblings- Rache der Geistig-Beschr a« nkten an denen, die es weniger sind. Moral judgement and condemnation is the favourite form of revenge of the spiritually limited on those who are less so.

—Nietzsche, FriedrichWilhelm

An artist who has travelled on a steam train, driven an automobile,or flowninanairplanedoesn'tfeelthesame way about form and space as one who has not.

—Davis, Stuart

There is a formal poetry perfect only in form†the number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wantedöthey come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle.

—Sandburg, Carl

Some poems have form as a tree has form and some as water poured into a vase.

—Pound, Ezra Loomis

Each individual work serves as an expression of our most personal state of mind at that particular moment and of the inescapable, imperative need for release by means of an appropriate act of creation: in the rhythm, form, colour and mood of a picture.

—Feininger, Lyonel

'Form follows profit' is the aesthetic principle of our times. Thus, design skill is measured today by the architect's ability to build the largest possible enclosure for the smallest investment in the quickest time.

—Rogers, Richard George Rogers, Baron

A decision of the courts decided that the game of golf may be played on a Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

—Leacock, Stephen Butler

The human species is, to some extent, the result of mistakes which arrested our development and prevented us from assuming the somewhat unglamorous form of our primitive ancestors.

—Miller,JonathanWolfe

The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.

—Saroyan,William

To think a soul so near divine, Within a form, so angel fair, United to a heart like thine, Has gladdened once our humble sphere.

—Bronte«  , Anne

   Yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo, boto¤  n de pensamiento que busca ser la rosa; se anuncia con un beso que en mis labios se posa al abrazo imposible de laVenus de Milo. I seek a form that my style cannot discover, a bud of thought that wants to be a rose; it is heralded by a kiss that is placed on my lips in the impossible embrace of theVenus de Milo.

—Dar|¤  o, Rube¤  n pseudonym of Fe¤  lixRube¤  nGarc|¤a Sarmiento

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but†a wicked race of deceivers†took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely formintoathousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled bodyof Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them.We have not yet found them all†nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.

—Milton,John

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this, it requires the highest type of human natureöa type nowhere at present existing.

—Spencer, Herbert

   Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.

—Barth, Karl

There isnothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it mayölight, shade and perspective will always make it beautiful.

—Constable,John

Leben ist, dass imWechsel der Materie die Form erhalten bleibt. Life is that the form is maintained through the change of substance.

—Mann,Thomas

Iown Ilike definiteforminwhat myeyesaretorest upon; and if landscapes were sold, likethe sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.

—Stevenson, Robert Louis

For Mercy has a human heart Pity a human face: And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.

—Blake,William

Man found his form and his identity under the action of religious principles and energies; the confusion in which he is losing them cannot be re-ordered by purely human efforts.

—Berdyaev, Nicholas

We should never make a god out of form.We should struggle for form onlyas long as it serves as a means of expression for the inner sound.

—Kandinsky,Wassily

Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the L revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely hehath borne ourgriefs, and carried our sorrows.

—Bible (Old Testament)

One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling Nor form, nor feeling, great or small; A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual All-in-all!

—Wordsworth,William

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

—Crisp, Quentin

one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.

—Olson, Charles

There is an inside and an outside to every form.

—Hepworth, Dame Barbara

Father is rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips.Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism, are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism.

—Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam

I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else† I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotionsötragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so onöand the fact that lots of people breakdown and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!

—Rothko, Mark originally Marcus Rothkovitch

It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.

—Bell, (Arthur) Clive Howard

'Takethy beak fromout my heart, and takethy formfrom off my door!' Quoth the raven,'Nevermore.'

—Poe, EdgarAllan

Aphorismsgive you more for your time and money than any other literary form.Only the poem comes near to it, but then most good poems either start off from an aphorism orarrive at one† Aphorisms and epigrams are the corner-stones of literaryart.

—Dudek, Louis

Thankstohis bodily formand thankstohismind, [man] is a universal machine, capable of an infinite diversity of movement.

—Redtenbacher, Ferdinand

Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide; The Form remains, the function never dies; While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, We Men, who in our morn of youth defied The elements, must vanish;öbe it so!

—Wordsworth,William

Baseball is a Lockean game, a kind of contract theory in ritual form, a set of atomic individuals who assent to patterns of limited co-operation in their mutual interest.

—Novak, Michael

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

—Keats,John

Innovationmost ofthetime issimply taking A,B,C and D, which already exist, and putting them together in a form called E.

—Schiller, Friedrich

I wanted to know the true nature of the'otherness' I had been born into. It was not a European thing. I wanted to paint thegreat purityand implacability of the landscape. I wanted a visual form of the'otherness'of the thing not seen.

—Nolan, Sir Sidney Robert

Ah, what avails the sceptred race! Ah, what the form divine!

—Landor,Walter Savage