Quotes about form
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“You gotta know when to be lazy. Done correctly, it's an art form that benefits everyone.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Choice

Source: The Choice

Art

“Everything that happens to you is a form of instruction if you pay attention.”

Robert Greene book Mastery

Source: Mastery

“Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Time

“Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.”

Rita Mae Brown (1944) Novelist, poet, screenwriter, activist

Many sources attribute this quote to Brown without giving a specific reference to her writings. The earliest located is the following variation from p. 47 of Musgrave Landing: Musings on the Writing Life by Susan Musgrave (1994), which Musgrave quotes as "Rita Mae Brown's warning": "If you become the kind of writer who calls forth heated emotional states, be careful. There are a lot of unbalanced people out there. The statistics on insanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's got to be you."
Disputed

Thinking, Suffering

“In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Context: Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think... In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

Intelligence

“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

Das Naturgesetz und die Struktur der Materie (1967), as translated in Natural Law and the Structure of Matter (1981), p. 34

Mathematics, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“It can be… difficult to to learn how the world truly is, to see it in its true shape and form… most human beings never do. Most could not bear it.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

World, Learning

“Yoga is the cessation of the movements of the mind. Then there is abiding in the Seer's own form.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

Patanjali, in “Yoga and You” [citation needed]
Source: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“It's only through form that we can realize emptiness”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can using only their hands and feet make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

People, World, Art, History

“Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet (1909): The Rejected Statement, Pt. I : The Limits to Toleration
1900s

“Oh I don't plan on getting married. It's a legalized form of prostitution.”

Candace Bushnell book The Carrie Diaries

Source: The Carrie Diaries

“I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman's back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in the elusive forms of reality.”

Isabel Allende book Portrait in Sepia

Source: Portrait in Sepia

Truth, Beauty, Autumn, Reality

“Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Learning

“Scapegrace leaped up. “I am the Killer Supreme! I make
murder into an art form!”
Skulduggery hit him again and Scapegrace did a little twirl
before falling.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Playing with Fire

Art

“Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety…. One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Joy

“Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Love, Sun

“Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.”

Spike Milligan (1918–2002) British-Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor

Variant: Money can't buy you friends, but you do get a better class of enemy.

Money, Happiness

“i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

“It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Books, Reading, Personality

“Aristotle's axiom: The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”

Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990) Canadian eductor

Source: Peter's People and Their Marvelous Ideas

“Delay is the deadliest form of denial.”

C. Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993) British naval historian

The Law of Delay (1970).

“You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

"Sundays of a Bourgeois"
Source: Les dimanches d'un bourgeois de Paris, et autres aventures parisiennes

Fools, Intelligence

“Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”

James Hillman (1926–2011) American psychologist

Life, Star, Light

“once I falsely hoped to meet the beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Love, Hope, Falseness

“If some lives form a perfect circle, other take shape in ways we cannot predict or always understand. Loss has been part of my journey. But it has also shown me what is precious. So has love for which I can only be grateful.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

Love, Way, Understanding, Loss

“Listen, every object's in flux. The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil-they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 30, Colonel Sanders

Love, Life, Faith, Justice

“People say they "find" love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a CERTAIN love.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Love, People

“I know that what you call 'God' really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.”

Wilhelm Reich book Listen, Little Man!

Source: Listen, Little Man!

Love, God, Nature, Thinking

“To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.”

Idries Shah book Reflections

Source: Reflections

People, Hope, Idea, Freedom

“To remember everything is a form of madness.”

Brian Friel Translations

Source: Translations

Madness

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

E.L. Doctorow (1931–2015) novelist, editor, professor

Interview in Writers at Work (1988)

“Julia looked back at Hadassah on the bloodstained sand. A great emptiness opened within her as she looked at the still form. Gone, too, was the salt that had kept her from completely corruption.”

Francine Rivers book A Voice in the Wind

Source: A Voice in the Wind

“Love is deceitful and sublime. In its truest form, it brings out the best in all beings. At its worse, It's a tool used to manipulate and ruin any one who is stupid enough to hold it. Don't be stupid.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Love, Stupidity

“All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Section 4.14
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Art

“That memory made a lump form in my throat as I remembered his face, serious and gorgeous, those brown eyes intense and passionate as he spoke up for me and convinced the others of my value.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Memory, Passion

“The odd thing about this form of communication is you're more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many… somethings. So, thanks.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Communication

“For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

Love, Women, Men, Understanding

“I feel so sorry that many Christians live in bondage even though Jesus has signed their release form with His own blood.”

Brother Yun (1958) Chinese christian house church leader

Source: The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun

Feeling

“I'm for open-mindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the truth.' The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.”

Philip Pullman (1946) English author

Truth

“So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Silence, Parting

“Fear is the greatest form of oppression.
The best way to rise up in protest is to live your life to
its fullest!”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Second Helpings

Life, Fear, Way

“He nodded and curled over his paper, writing quickly. As his words took form on the white page, she got to watch him… and realized she never wanted him to go. She wanted him here beside her forever.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Mine

“Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

“In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Life

“Unshed tears leave a deposit on your heart. Eventually they form a crust around it and paralyze it, the way mineral deposits paralyze a washing machine.”

Susanna Tamaro (1957) Italian writer

Source: Follow Your Heart

Way, Tear, Heart

“And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Dance

“Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.”

John Hersey book Hiroshima

Source: Hiroshima

Life, Money

“If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Source: Eating Animals

Life, Intelligence, Fish

“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”

Rachel Carson book The Sea Around Us

Source: The Sea Around Us

Life, Way, Change, Sea

“Keller couldn't form any words for a moment. Then she said, "Galen? When you choose a form, choose something gentle."

I thought you thought everybody had to be a fighter." He said.

Some people shouldnt have to be.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Witchlight

People

“Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.”

Bernhard Schlink book The Reader

Source: The Reader

Fear, Memory, Passion

“Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

God, Children, Thinking, Joy

“But where pain was, healing could come; where loneliness was, new relationships could be formed; where rejection was, new love could be found. It was a moment. And moments changed. She would have to live through the moment to get to the next.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: How to Fall in Love

Love, Pain, Change, Loneliness

“Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”

Michael Pollan book The Omnivore's Dilemma

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Dreams, Reality, Dependency

“Cupid, you worthless bastard, I summon you to human form! (Julian)
Gee, I can't imagine why he wouldn't respond to that. (Grace)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Fantasy Lover

Source: Fantasy Lover

Imagination

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over. So in a series of acts of kindness there is, at last, one which makes the heart run over.”

James Boswell book The Life of Samuel Johnson

(19 September 1777)
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)
Variant: We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

Friendship, Heart

“My lips are just forming his name when his fingers lock around my throat.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

“With science, ideas can germinate within a bed of theory, form, and practice that assists their growth… But we as gardeners, must beware… for some seeds are the seeds of ruin… and the most iridescent blooms are often the most dangerous”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

Idea, Science

“Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: The Journals Of Anais Nin

Nature

“Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted

People, Joy, Envy, Hurt

“The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.”

John Dewey book Experience and Education

Source: Experience and Education

Learning

“All the events of your past have formed a lens, or paradigm, through which you see the world. And since no one's past is exactly like anyone else's, no two people see alike.”

Sean Covey (1964) author; business executive

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide

People, World, Past

“To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.”

Andrei Lankov (1963) Russian academic

Suffering

“Boys! Are they always this impossible? Do they always say cryptic, indecipherable things? (Note
to self: work with Liz to adapt her boy-to-English translator into a more mobile form—like maybe a
watch or necklace.)”

Ally Carter Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

Source: Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

Boy

“It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.”

Amy Tan The Hundred Secret Senses

Source: The Hundred Secret Senses

Hope

“Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched".”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Happiness, Motivation, Personality

“Absence, the highest form of presence.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

“All things that have form eventually decay." -Orochimaru”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

“Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

People, Faith, Understanding, Thinking

“I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and [illegible] liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

On his plans for his autobiography Laterna Magica, as quoted in "Who is he really?" http://www.ingmarbergman.se/universe.asp?guid=4F72F9D3-43BB-405D-B42B-3D091B8FAF3A <br class="br">Source: The Magic Lantern

Truth

“Knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Men, Books, Knowledge

“I'm not good with children," the god confessed. "Or people. Well, any organic life forms, really.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Life, God, Children, People

“Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”

Toni Morrison book Sula

Source: Sula (1973)

Art

“You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time (1962)

“I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish and I don't suppose I have ever come much closer to saying 'Tra la la' as I did the lathering for I was feeling in mid season form this morning.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Feeling, Season

“I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be in formed of the secret with which I am acquainted. That cannot be.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Secret, Hope

“Love is a negative form of hatred.”

Roger Zelazny book This Immortal

Source: This Immortal

Love

“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) French novelist and art critic

Source: Against Nature

Dreams, Idea, Solitude, Reading

“No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Life, Personality

“Nothing can prevent your picture from coming into concrete form except the same power which gave it birth – yourself.”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

Birth

“Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Ficciones

Source: Ficciones

“Eve didn't choose to eat the apple. She was tempted by the serpent."
"Yes," I argue, thoughts coming out half-formed. "But… she didn't have to take a bite. She chose to.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

“squats are a form of torture designed by people who don’t need to do squats in the first place”

Nora Roberts book Bed of Roses

Source: Bed of Roses

People

“You have splendid breasts, lass," he purred, cupping the plump mounds. "Splendid," he repeated stupidly, and she almost laughed. Men loved breasts any shape or form, they just loved them.

-Drustan to Gwen”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Kiss of the Highlander

Love, Men

“The best form of saying is being”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Source: Passages de la guerre révolutionnaire : le Congo

“All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession.”

Mary Roach (1959) American science writer

Books, Science

“We are more than the parts that form us.”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

Parting

“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Source: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Art

“Form follows emotion”

Walter Isaacson book Steve Jobs

Source: Steve Jobs

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons (11 November 1947), published in 206–07 The Official Report, House of Commons (5th Series), 11 November 1947, vol. 444, cc. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1947/nov/11/parliament-bill#column_206 <br class="br">Post-war years (1945–1955) <br class="br">Variant: Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried. <br class="br">Context: Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Democracy