Quotes about shape
A collection of quotes on the topic of shape, use, likeness, world.
Quotes about shape

“No man knows fully what has shaped his own thinking”
Source: Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), p. ix (1957 edition)

"O gloriosissimi"

“Anytime you have to rely upon your enemy for a job you’re in bad shape.”
The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)
Context: So our people not only have to be re-educated to the importance of supporting black business, but the black man himself has to be made aware of the importance of going into business. And once you and I go into business, we own and operate at least the businesses in our community. What we will be doing is developing a situation wherein we will actually be able to create employment for the people in the community. And once you can create some employment in the community where you live it will eliminate the necessity of you and me having to act ignorantly and disgracefully, boycotting and picketing some place else trying to beg him for a job. Anytime you have to rely upon your enemy for a job you’re in bad shape.

Lionel Giles translation
Source: The Art of War, Chapter VI · Weaknesses and Strengths

“I never was in love - yet the voice and the shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.”

“Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
Mistakenly attributed to Vladimir Mayakovsky in The Political Psyche (1993) by Andrew Samuels, p. 9; mistakenly attributed to Brecht in Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter (1993) by Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, p. 80; variant translation: "Art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it."
First recorded in Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1924; edited by William Keach (2005), Ch. 4: Futurism, p. 120): "Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes."
Disputed

Source: We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
“Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.”
City Aphorisms, Third Selection (1986)

“Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions.”
Desire https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2011/04/desire, Dallin H. Oaks, April 2011

As quoted in Mathematics, Education and Philosophy: An International Perspective (1994) by Paul Ernest
This has also been quoted or misquoted as "There lives no man upon the earth who can give a final judgement upon what the most beautiful shape of man might be; God only knows that".

"Meatless Monday: WWE Superstar Daniel Bryan Stomps On Meat" by Ellen Kanner, HuffPost (16 April 2012) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-kanner/meatless-monday-wwe-super_b_1424303.html.

Paik (1969) Versatile Color TV Synthesizer, Manifesto, cited in: Edith Decker-Phillips. Paik Video, Barrytown, Limited, 1998. p. 154
1960s

Source: The Art of War, Chapter VI · Weaknesses and Strengths

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Context: There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die...

“Grief changes shape, but it never ends.”

There are many other options of organization for the future than those typically discussed today... In order to accomplish this task one must be free of bias and nationalism, and reflect those qualities in the design of policies. How would you approach that? This is a difficult project requiring input from many disciplines.
Source: Designing the Future (2007), p. 6-7

Source: Election address; letter to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Marlborough (8 March 1880), quoted in The Times (9 March 1880), p. 8

“Nothing shapes your life more than the commitments you choose to make.”
Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”
from: Joan Miro: Selected Writings and Interviews, M.Rowell, Thames and Hudson, 1987
1940 - 1960

1970 - 1986, Some Memories of Drawings (1976)
Context: It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colours put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint. … I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way — things I had no words for.<!-- Also quoted in Georgia O’Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction (2007), edited by Richard Marshall, p. 13

“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.”
Source: Witches Abroad

“She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.”
Source: River of Blue Fire

Foreword (January 1960)
You Learn by Living (1960)
Context: One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Source: "The End of Reason" (1941), p. 34.

Diary entry (1913), # 944; as quoted by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee - Part Four', : Klee as an Expressionist and Constructivist Painter http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev27.html
1911 - 1914

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 212.
Secondary Sources

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 464.

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), III Six books on Light and Shade

2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)

Bruce Lee interview on the Pierre Berton Show (1971)

Drafts on the history of the Church (Section 3). Yahuda Ms. 15.3, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel. 2006 Online Version at Newton Project http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00220

Part III, No. 5 - Walton's Book of Lives. Compare: "The pen wherewith thou dost so heavenly sing / Made of a quill from an angel's wing", Henry Constable, Sonnet; "Whose noble praise / Deserves a quill pluckt from an angel's wing", Dorothy Berry, Sonnet.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821)

In a letter to the Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, From Venice, April 1, 1518; as quoted by J.A.Y. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle in Titian his life and times - With some account ..., publisher John Murray, London, 1877, p. 181-82
1510-1540

"Written on the Wall at West Forest Temple" (《题西林壁》) (1084), in Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o, trans. Burton Watson (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1994), p. 108

Remarks by President Obama at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at United Nations Compound in Nairobi, Kenya (July 25, 2015) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/25/remarks-president-obama-global-entrepreneurship-summit
2015

Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 2
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah

Concepts
The Theory of Democracy Revisited (1987), 1. Can Democracy Be Just Anyting?

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)

Other

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)
“If thou make any law or establish any custom for the general good, be the first to submit thyself thereto; then does a people show more regard for justice nor refuse submission when it has seen their author obedient to his own laws. The world shapes itself after its ruler's pattern, nor can edicts sway men's minds so much as their monarch's life; the unstable crowd ever changes along with the prince.”
In commune iubes si quid censesque tenendum, <br/>primus iussa subi: tunc observantior aequi <br/>fit populus nec ferre negat, cum viderit ipsum <br/>auctorem parere sibi. componitur orbis <br/>regis ad exemplum, nec sic inflectere sensus <br/>humanos edicta valent quam vita regentis.
In commune iubes si quid censesque tenendum,
primus iussa subi: tunc observantior aequi
fit populus nec ferre negat, cum viderit ipsum
auctorem parere sibi. componitur orbis
regis ad exemplum, nec sic inflectere sensus
humanos edicta valent quam vita regentis.
Panegyricus de Quarto Consulatu Honorii Augusti, lines 296-301 http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Claudian/De_IV_Consulatu_Honorii*.html#296.

2015, Bloody Sunday Speech (March 2015)

Sometimes attributed to Augustine, but is from Phyllis McGinley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_McGinley, The Province of the Heart, "The Honor of Being a Woman" (1959).
Misattributed

Henry Mintzberg (1989) Mintzberg on management: inside our strange world of organizations. p. 301. As cited in: R. van den Nieuwenhof (2003) 2 strategie: omgaan met de omgeving. p. 36

“The world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape.”
PENN Address (2004)

Zadeh (1994) in: Betty Blair. "Short Biographical Sketch" http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/24_folder/24_articles/24_zadeh.html. Azerbaijan International, Vol. 2:4 (Winter 1994), p. 49.
1990s

As the theoretician of the "Drain Theory", he explained in his lecture delivered at the East Indian Association, London on 2 May 1867 in Forerunners of Dadabhai Naoroji’s Drain Theory, 3 December 2013, Jstor Organization http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4411389?uid=3738256&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21103047963541,
Drain Theory