Formal Quotes - Page 7

• I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college.

  Scott Westerfeld

  College, Class, Training

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• You don't need a formal prayer or invocation to call the angels to your side. Simply think, 'Angels, please surround me,' and they are there.

  Doreen Virtue

  Inspiring, Prayer, Angel

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• After years of denial and deception, the Philip Morris company has admitted that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases. This formal acknowledgment comes far too late but still we must all welcome it. It can be the beginning of clearing the air.

  William J. Clinton

  Cancer, Air, Years

  Clinton, William J. (2000). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1999”, p.1762, Best Books on

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• I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing. Then I want to do something modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil will be able to hold without technique.

  Paul Klee

  Knowing Nothing, Drawing, Work Out

  "Artists on Art, from the 14th - 20th centuries". Book edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, p. 442, 1972.

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• Artificial intelligence is based on the assumption that the mind can be described as some kind of formal system manipulating symbols that stand for things in the world. Thus it doesn't matter what the brain is made of, or what it uses for tokens in the great game of thinking. Using an equivalent set of tokens and rules, we can do thinking with a digital computer, just as we can play chess using cups, salt and pepper shakers, knives, forks, and spoons. Using the right software, one system (the mind) can be mapped onto the other (the computer).

  George Johnson

  Science, Thinking, Knives

  George Johnson (2011). “Machinery of the Mind”, p.450, Crown

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• While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.

  Mark Epstein

  Buddhist, Disappointment, Moving

  Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.89, Penguin

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• A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to
  present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a
  candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion
  and/or euthanasia.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Evil, Abortion, Catholic

  Memorandum to Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, D.C., 2004.

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• Actually, there is a sense in which polygynous marriage has not been the historical norm - even where polygyny is permitted, multiple wives are generally reserved for a relatively few men who can afford them or qualify via formal rank. For eons and eons, most marriages have been monogamous, even though most societies haven't been

  Robert Wright

  Men, Wife, Historical

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• 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

  Wall, School, Library

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• ... one of the main functions of an analogy or model is to suggest extensions of the theory by considering extensions of the analogy, since more is known about the analogy than is known about the subject matter of the theory itself ... A collection of observable concepts in a purely formal hypothesis suggesting no analogy with anything would consequently not suggest either any directions for its own development.

  Mary Hesse

  Science, Analogies, Development

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• Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.

  William James

  Apology, Opportunity, Men

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.134, Booklassic

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• Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the sophisticated deplore these formalities as 'empty,' 'meaningless,' or 'dishonest,' and scorn to use them. No matter how 'pure' their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Moving, People, Together

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• My chief job is to constantly stir or rekindle the curiosity of people that gets driven out by bureaucracy and formal schooling systems.

  Akio Morita

  Education, Jobs, People

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• Green Giant contained a very strong and clear site and building design concept. Green Giant had strong formal, aesthetic and programmatic concepts, coupled with a good understanding and incorporation of 2030 Palette design strategies.

  Edward Mazria

  Strong, Design, Understanding

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• I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

  Peter Greenaway

  Ideas, Plot, Cinema

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• Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Discovery, Two

  Letter to J.S. Switzer on April 23, 1953. "The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry". Book by H. Floris Cohen, p. 234, 1994.

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• Racing serves as a formal demonstration of your ability to ride the three-headed monster. The first monster is your physical preparation-lifting weights for strength, running for endurance, working on your technique. The second monster is your mental preparation-all our jabbering about humility, battling for your life, taking complete responsibility for the outcome. The last monster is your X Factor, your soul, your courage. Taken altogether, I call this three-headed monster the Process of Winning.

  Brad Alan Lewis

  Running, Taken, Responsibility

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• 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.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Math, Errors, America

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder”, p.171, Random House

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• We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.

  Anne Enright

  Art, Small Gestures, Body

  Anne Enright (2010). “The Gathering”, p.128, Random House

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• Homeopathy may be defined as a specious mode of doing nothing. While it waits on the natural progress of disease and the restorative tendence of nature on the one hand, or the injurious advance of disease on the other, it supplies the craving for activity, on the part of the patient and his friends, by the formal and regular administration of nominal medicine. Although homeopathy will, at some future time, be classed with historical delusions.

  Jacob Bigelow

  Hands, Medicine, Waiting

  Jacob Bigelow (1867). “Modern Inquiries, Classical, Professional, and Miscellaneous”, p.231

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• To argue that we humans are capable of complex multifarious thought and feeling, whereas the sheep's perception is probably limited by lowly sheepish perceptions, is no more to the point than if I were to slaughter and eat you on the grounds that I am a sophisticated personality able to enjoy Mozart, formal logic and cannibalism, whereas your imaginative world seems confined to True Romances and tinned spaghetti.

  Brigid Brophy

  Animal, Sheep, Personality

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• Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Education, Children, Hands

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• My hope and wish is that one day, formal education will pay attention to what I call 'education of the heart'.

  Dalai Lama

  Heart, Wish, One Day

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• Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference

  Ambrose Bierce

  Military, Silence, Form

  Ambrose Bierce (2015). “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians”, p.11, Ambrose Bierce

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• Since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels ... , or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music.

  Frank Zappa

  Jewels, Differences, Listening

  Frank Zappa, Peter Occhiogrosso (1990). “Real Frank Zappa Book”, p.34, Simon and Schuster

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