The hard thing when you get old is to keep your horizons open. The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions; you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.
— Howard Thurman
Romantic Shape Of Things quotations
One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.

In the gay world, some of the most enriching and incredibly life-affirming and shaping relationships, very often between younger boys and older men, can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys. They can save those young boys from desolation, suicide and drug addiction, all sorts of things, providing they're consensual.


One of the most important things that I have learned in my 57 years is that life is all about choices. On every journey you take, you face choices. At every fork in the road, you make a choice. And it is those decisions that shape our lives.
Ten percent of the big fish still remain.
There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around.
The most important thing in your life is your health and your body.
You can have all the education and you can have millions of dollars in the bank, but if you've got headaches every day, if you're fat and you are out of shape - what good is your money? Your health account and your bank account, build them both up!

I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.
Agriculture is for living; mind culture is for life. Skills are for shaping material things so that they cater more for the comfort of man; studies are for shaping attitudes, feelings, desires, emotions and impulses of man, so that they may confer more peace, more joy and more fortitude on man.
One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom.

A tree is a self: it is 'unseen shaping' more than it is leaves or bark, roots or cellulose or fruit ... What this means is that we must address trees as we must address all things, confronting them in the awareness that we are in the presence of numinous mystery.
The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences. No one can say that the O’s roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or of a girl’s breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things.
I am not talking to you from the point of view of just wishful thinking, or imaginary craziness. I'm talking to you from a deeper basic understanding - quantum physics really begins to point to this discovery, it says that you can't have a universe without mind entering into it, the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived.

Deep within all of us there is a yearning to be brave.
And like all of our deepest, truest and best yearning, it comes from how we were made.Courage-the power to do the right thing even when it is scary and hard- resonates deeply with the original shape of our soul.
Loving oneself isn't hard, when you understand who and what 'yourself' is.
It has nothing to do with the shape of your face, the size of your eyes, the length of your hair or the quality of your clothes. It's so beyond all of those things and it's what gives life to everything about you. Your own self is such a treasure.
In my opinion, everything, every shape, every bit of natural form, animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything you like are all things that can help you to make a sculpture.

A sculptor is a person obsessed with the form and the shape of things, and it's not just Ihe shape of any one thing, but the shape of any thing and everything.
I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions;
I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
We know today about nutrition and we know about exercise.
There's no reason for anybody to be sick and tired, fat and out of shape -- it's ridiculous! This has got to be taught in the schools. It's got to be taught in kindergarten. That's when kids should first get the idea that the most important thing in your life is your health and your body.

A particular train of thought persisted in, be it good or bad, cannot fail to produce its results on the character and circumstances. A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
The reverence that the object maker has for the materials, for the shape, and for the miracle of his skill transcends to God, the Master Craftsman, the Creator of all things, who uses us, our hands, as His tools to make these beautiful things.

Earth and sea merged, the sea tossed itself in the air in a fantastic dance, into the shapes of men and horses and tattered banners. I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.
True perfection seems imperfect, yet it is perfectly itself.
True fullness seems empty, yet it is fully present. True straightness seems crooked. True wisdom seems foolish. True art seems artless. The Master allows things to happen. She shapes events as they come. She steps out of the way and lets the Tao speak for itself.
I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard.
Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself... That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.

Everyone has a 'risk muscle.' You keep it in shape by trying new things. If you don't, it atrophies. Make a point of using it at least once a day.
A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.
And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

I hate the term 'arm candy.' But, look, a woman's figure is a beautiful thing, and if she has shapely legs, then she should show them off, because men love to see that. Not just heterosexual men - gay men like to see a woman in her beauty and the shape of her.
I was in the gym working on my triceps, and I was thinking, just as I did the 50-pound pulldown, I am going to be in better shape by the end of the year [2016] than I've ever been in my life. I really just smiled at the notion: Wow, what a thing.
Oh say, can you see, it's really such a mess.
Every inch of earth is a fighting nest. Giant pencial and lipstick tube shaped things, continue to rain and cause scream and pain, and the arctic stains from silver blue to bloody red.

There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.
A man should think when he fishing of all manner and shape of things, flowing as easily through the mind as the light stream among the rocks
To me, you can't have style without being inspired.
When I design a collection, I am inspired by so many things. The color of a flower. The shape of a butterly's wing. The juxtaposition of an old tenement building next to a shiny new skyscraper.
It's important to be precise about words, because of the thought value of them-they frame and shape so much of the way we understand things.
But actually a code is a language for translating one thing into another.
And mathematics is the language of science. My big thesis is that although the world looks messy and chaotic, if you translate it into the world of numbers and shapes, patterns emerge and you start to understand why things are the way they are.