108 Formal Quotes

Following is our list of formal quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about being formal.

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Famous Formal Quotes

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini. — Paul Muldoon

In design, be logical, search for truth, be clear. — Massimo Vignelli

Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others — Peter Abelard

Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space. — Joan Mitchell

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense. — Josiah Wedgwood

A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence. — Howard Whitley Eves

. . . colors like a flourish of trumpets or pianissimo on the violin, great, calm, oscillating, splintered surgances . . . . Is this not form? — Giacomo Puccini

The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree. — Aristotle

An object should be judged by whether it has a form consistent with its use. — Bruno Munari

Form and function are a unity, two sides of one coin. In order to enhance function, appropriate form must exist or be created. — Ida Rolf

Form and function are a unity, two sides of one coin. In order to enhance function, appropriate form must exist or be created. — Ida P. Rolf

Conferences at the top level are always courteous. Name-calling is left to the foreign ministers. — W. Averell Harriman

Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness. — Otto von Bismarck

Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order — Victor Papanek

Short Formal Quotes

  • Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune. — Jim Rohn
  • Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. — Zora Neale Hurston
  • Formal education will make you a living. Self education will make you a fortune. — Jim Rohn
  • I formally proposed. I'm a good Southern gentleman. — Vince Gill
  • The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education. — Paul E. Gray
  • Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies. — Andrea Dworkin
  • Grilling takes the formality out of entertaining. Everyone wants to get involved. — Bobby Flay
  • Successful cooperation in or by formal organizations is the abnormal, not the normal, condition. — Chester Barnard
  • Schools teach you how to work for money, but don't teach how to make money work for you — Robert Kiyosaki
  • I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess. — Walt Disney

Formal Image Quotes

Formal quote Formal education will make you a living, self-education will make you a fortune.
Formal education will make you a living, self-education will make you a fortune.

Formal Education Quotes

Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it. — Ella Baker

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.Einstein thinks that formal education is a waste of timeAlbert Einstein

Throughout my formal education I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were. The current definitive answer to almost any question can be found within the four walls of most libraries. — Arthur Ashe

Formal quote Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.
Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

If you are working or you are running a business you have to set aside time and money to invest in your continued formal education and skills acquisition. — Strive Masiyiwa

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education. — Maya Angelou

Formal quote No amount of learning can cure stupidity and formal education positively fortifies it.
No amount of learning can cure stupidity and formal education positively fortifies it.

There are several things I think I would have done if I had the chance again. I would have been a little more patient about getting out into the world. I would have seen to it that I had a more formal education. I would have become an accomplished mu — Frank Sinatra

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! — Roger Moore

Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life. — B. F. Skinner

So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.' — Neil deGrasse Tyson

Being Formal Quotes

[To a woman whose cellphone rang during a formal meeting:] You'd better answer that. It could be someone important. — Queen Elizabeth II

Courtesy should be apparent in all our actions and words and in all aspects of daily life. But be courtesy, I do not mean rigid, cold formality. Courtesy in the truest sense is selfless concern for the welfare and physical and mental comfort of the other person. — Mas Oyama

It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child's interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated. — Jerome Bruner

We are all members of the same great family ... On social occasions the formality of strictly military occasions should be relaxed, and a spirit of friendliness and goodwill should prevail. — John A. Lejeune

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. — Elfriede Jelinek

At a purely formal level, one could call probability theory the study of measure spaces with total measure one, but that would be like calling number theory the study of strings of digits which terminate. — Terence Tao

...a consistency proof for [any] system ... can be carried out only by means of modes of inference that are not formalized in the system ... itself. — Kurt Gödel

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final. — Hypatia

Never will anyone who says his Rosary every day become a formal heretic or be led astray by the devil. — Louis de Montfort

The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content. — John Searle

Formal Wear Quotes

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Real Freedom is to not feel limited when wearing this Zen robe, this troublesome formal robe. Similarly, in our busy life we should wear this civilization without being bothered by it, without ignoring it, without being caught by it. — Shunryu Suzuki

I cannot feel my legs from the waist down any longer. But who cares? I look good and that's all that matters. And when I die of hypothermia for wearing formal shorts in winter, tell them to put that on my tombstone. — Eliza Coupe

I dress for the occasion. I like Tom Ford for more formal, especially his suits, and I wear a lot of Under Armour for my athletic gear. I also love Rag & Bone. — Tom Brady

Rental formal wear of the sky-blue, brocade and shiny varieties is favored by upwardly mobile young gangsters drafted as groomsmen for weddings. — George V. Higgins

Men turn to formal wear when they want a new job or when they think their current one is in danger. They try to present themselves as powerful and successful. — Peter York

You need to have one element about your outfit that is imperfect, that says you live in it and you're not letting it control you. I think men and women both need a softness about them with formal wear. — Paul Feig

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. — John Green

Formalized Quotes

[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. — Wallace Stegner

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little. — Stephen Spender

For some reason I have a visual intuition that allows me to design things in an interesting way, and I don't know where that came from. Because I don't have this formal training, I seem to drift in a different direction. — David Carson

In the short term, this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy. — Nayib Bukele

At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. — Salvatore Quasimodo

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. — George Washington

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. — Octave Mirbeau

The questioning is a stupid formality aimed exclusively at preventing us from speaking at the demonstration. — Alexei Navalny

But the name Magnus Bane made him think of a towering sort of figure, with huge shoulders and formal purple warlock’s robes, calling down fire and lightning. Not Magnus himself, who was more of a cross between a panther and a demented elf. — Cassandra Clare

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

People Writing About Formal

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Read quotes by Jim Rohn

Jim Rohn
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Read quotes by Paul Muldoon

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Read quotes by Massimo Vignelli

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Read quotes by Peter Abelard

Peter Abelard
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Read quotes by Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini

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Read quotes by Aristotle

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More Formal Quotes

There are flash points between China and the U.S.. America’s treaty with Taiwan states that if the Chinese invade what they regard as their 23rd province, America will go to war. A red line for China, which could spark an invasion, is formal recognition of Taiwan by the U.S., or a declaration of independence by Taiwan. However, there’s no sign of either on the horizon. — Tim Marshall

One of the points that he makes is that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem doesn’t say that mathematics is junk; the theorem isn’t a cause for despair. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that no formal system—including mathematics—can be both complete and correct. Either there are statements that are true that cannot be proven true in the system, or there will be a contradiction somewhere inside the system. — Naval Ravikant

Why do we have schizophrenia in every culture on this planet? From an evolutionary perspective, schizophrenia is not a cool thing to have. ... Schizophrenia is not an adaptive trait. You can show this formally: schizophrenics have a lower rate of leaving copies of their genes in the next generation than unaffected siblings. By the rules, by the economics of evolution, this is a maladaptive trait. Yet, it chugs along at a one to two percent rate in every culture on this planet. — Robert M. Sapolsky

one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others — Allen Ginsberg

A detective with his murder mystery, a chemist seeking the structure of a new compound, use little of the formal and logical modes of reasoning. Through a series of intuitions, surmises, fancies, they stumble upon the right explanation, and have a knack of seizing it when it once comes within reach. — Gilbert N. Lewis

It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics. — Richard P. Feynman

OVATION, n. n ancient Rome, a definite, formal pageant in honor of one who had been disserviceable to the enemies of the nation. A lesser "triumph." — Ambrose Bierce

The Primal Essential Movements offer a simple, entry-level way to include strength training in your lifestyle. They entail conducting pushups, pullups, squats, and planks on a regular basis, with more attention paid to formal workouts during the intensity training phases. — Mark Sisson

There are some technologies I like, in formal security, cryptography like bullet-proofs, simplicity formal provable smart-contracting, some privacy tech. I don't like to name coins though some have deployed tech I invented over the years. — Adam Back

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. — Alberto Giacometti

The responsibility of the executive is (1) to create and maintain a sense of purpose and moral code for the organization; (2) to establish systems of formal and informal communication; and (3) to ensure the willingness of people to cooperate. — Chester Barnard

Learning, for Elon Musk, is simply the process of downloading data and algorithms into your brain. Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the ridiculously slow download speed of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he’s learned through reading. — Tim Urban

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. — Henry Mintzberg

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: 'You see,' he says, 'now that’s formalism. — Alain Robbe-Grillet

When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman. — Jon Krakauer

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