Quotes about shape
page 4

“Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

Source: The Joy Luck Club

Fate

“We can become inspired to shape a higher, more ideal future, and when we do, miracles happen.”

James Redfield book The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision

Source: The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision

Future

“Segregation shaped me; education liberated me.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Education

“… If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

World, Imagination

“It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It's what we do consistently.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

“The desire for knowledge shapes a man.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

Knowledge

“I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

People

“The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Color

“The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Men, World, Behavior, Nature

“I think… the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes… Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for whatmake you happy.”

Wally Lamb book She's Come Undone

Source: She's Come Undone

Life, Happiness, Secret, Thinking

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Plague of Doves

“It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”

Brian Friel (1929–2015) Irish dramatist, author and theatre director

History, Past

“A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot."

[(, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)]”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

Shoe, Personality, Clothes

“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Nature, Water

“People could bear so much, but Simon did not know how much of the original you was left when the world had twisted you into a whole different shape.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Bitter of Tongue

People, World

“Your beliefs shape your attitudes!”

Andy Stanley (1958) American Christian minister

“Maureen clapped her hands together. "Oh," she said in her elfin little voice. "It's pretty."
"Pretty?" Simon looked quickly at the hunched shape on top of the concrete block. "Maureen, what the hell-”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Hell

“I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable nighttime conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there's no light in the room.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Way, Feeling, Light

“The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Light

“I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”

Angela Carter book The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Source: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

Source: Suttree

“Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit…. They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Men, Star, Success, Falseness

“Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

Knowledge

“It was good to be here with Jem and Cecily an Charlotte, to be surrounded by their affection, but without her there would always be something missing, a Tessa-shaped part chiseled out of his heart that he could never get back.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Heart, Parting

“Man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

Source: Dreamtigers

Memory

“I have been bent and broken, but -I hope- into a better shape.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Hope, Motivational, Back To Work

“The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.”

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Feeling, Problem

“For the deeds of a man, not the words of a prophecy, are what shape his destiny.”

Lloyd Alexander book The High King

Source: The High King

“Above us our palace waits, the only one I've ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming again like fireflies in a summer evening.”

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956) novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist

Source: The Palace of Illusions

Waiting, Summer

“He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.”

Melissa Bank book The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Source: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Smile

“I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.”

Dorothy Dunnett (1923–2001) British writer

Source: The Game of Kings

Men, Fate, Time

“Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.”

Sherwood Smith book Crown Duel

Source: Crown Duel (Crown & Court #1 - 2, 1997)

Reality, Water, Memory, Time

“There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.”

Ayn Rand book Anthem

Source: Anthem

Men, Fear, Feeling, Sleep

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

“Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977) Nigerian writer

History

“all the time something within her was crying for a decision.
She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Love, Life, Money, Decision

“It was never too late to learn something. The past is unalterable in any event. The future is the only thing we can change. Learning the lessons of the past is the only way to shape the present and the future.”

Jim Butcher book Ghost Story

Source: Ghost Story

Way, Learning, Change, Past

“Do not mistake the rule of force
for true power. Men are not shaped by force.”

Euripidés The Bacchae

Source: The Bacchae

Men

“A long white ribbon shot out of the crack in the wall. The ribbon just kept coming, weaving itself into some kind of shape next to Anubis, and my first thought was, My god, he’s got a magic roll of toilet paper.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

God

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

Life, World

“Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

Men

“Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

World

“The hands of Fate keep time on a heart-shaped watch."

- Harkat Mulds(The Trials of Death)”

Darren Shan book Trials of Death

Source: Trials of Death

Death, Fate, Time, Heart

“You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.”

Joel Salatin (1957) American environmentalist

Source: Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food

Children, World, Food

“The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea (1955)
Context: The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many other things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. I want to give and take from my children and husband, to share with friends and community, to carry out my obligations to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen.
But I want first of all — in fact, as an end to these other desires — to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact — to borrow from the languages of the saints — to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.
Context: The shape of my life today starts with a family. I have a husband, five children and a home just beyond the suburbs of New York. I have also a craft, writing, and therefore work I want to pursue. The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many other things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. I want to give and take from my children and husband, to share with friends and community, to carry out my obligations to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen.
But I want first of all — in fact, as an end to these other desires — to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact — to borrow from the languages of the saints — to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from Phaedrus when he said, "May the outward and the inward man be at one." I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.

Life, Education, Heart, Childhood

“Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes shape.”

Sheri Reynolds (1967) American writer

Change

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Killing Rage: Ending Racism

World, Communication

“I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.”

Haruki Murakami book Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Time

“HOUSE RULES [at the Praetor Lupus Headquarters]

No shape-shifting in the hallways.
No howling.
No silver.
Clothing must be worn at all times. ALL TIMES.
No fighting. No biting.
Mark all your food before you put it in the communal refrigerator.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Food, Communication, Time, Fight

“Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Suffering

“Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.”

Carol Shields Unless

Source: Unless

People, Thinking

“In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

Books, World, Color, Sense

“Every relationship has a hard part at the beginning. This is our hard part. It's not like a puzzle piece where there's an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Parting

“India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. … India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.”

Shashi Tharoor (1956) Indian politician, diplomat, author

The Hindu, "The Shashi Tharoor column: A departure, fictionally", Sunday, September 16, 2001 Available Online http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/09/16/stories/13160675.htm <br class="br">2000s

“We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

World

“The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

Source: The Tale of Despereaux (2004)
Context: Despereaux looked down at the book, and something remarkable happened. The marks on the pages, the "squiggles" as Merlot referred to them, arranged themselves into shapes. The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time

Time

“She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

World, Mood, Dependency

“The visions we offer our children shape the future.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Children, Future

“What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

Past

“That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Happiness

“This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Written on the Body

Heart

“I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Childhood

“There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

“Ian sighed wanly. "I once had the means to be gaga over art–before I found myself in a country where the standard of beauty is toaster waffles shaped like cartoon characters.”

Gordon Korman book The Medusa Plot

Source: The Medusa Plot

Beauty, Art, Country

“Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.”

Jean Genet book The Thief's Journal

Source: The Thief's Journal

World

“She knew the true shape of the world. All else was shadow and the sound of distant drums.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

World, Distant

“I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

Life

“The visions we offer our children shape the future. It _matters_ what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Children, Dreams, Future

“you ask me what I'm looking for, and I outline you.
you don't recognize the shape, offer other names.
you say my time will come, and I hope.”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

Hope, Time

“My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

Source: My Family and Other Animals

Life, Childhood

“When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformation of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 162.

World, Thinking, Sense, Change

“Life into death—life’s other shape, no rupture, only crossing.”

Dejan Stojanovic book Circling: 1978-1987

“Awakening of a Flower,” p. 38
Circling: 1978-1987 (1993), Sequence: “A Conversations with Atoms”

Life, Death

“In the twilight of late enlightenment, the insight gains shape that our "praxis," which we always held to be the most legitimate child of reason, in fact, represents the central myth of modernity.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 539

“Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

::like a buttercup

::::upon its branching stem —

save that's green and wooden —

::I come, my sweet,

::::to sing to you.

We lived long together,

::a life filled,

::::if you will,

with flowers. So that

::I was cheered

::::when I first came to know

that there were flowers also

::in hell.

::::Today

I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers

::that we both loved,

::::even to this poor

colorless thing —

::I saw it

::::when I was a child —

little prized among the living

::but the dead see,

::::asking among themselves:

What do I remember

::that was shaped

::::as this thing is shaped?
while our eyes fill
::with tears.
::::Of love, abiding love
it will be telling
::though too weak a wash of crimson
::::colors it
to make it wholly credible.
::There is something
::::something urgent
I have to say to you
::and you alone
::::but it must wait
while I drink in
::the joy of your approach,
::::perhaps for the last time.
And so
::with fear in my heart
::::I drag it out
and keep on talking
::for I dare not stop.”

William Carlos Williams book Journey to Love

Journey to Love (1955), Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

Love, Life, Fear, Color

“I have the right to do whatever I wish with my property. If I own a pile of wood, I can set fire to it even if it is currently nailed together in the shape of a barn. Cigarettes may not be healthy for me in the long run, but I have the freedom to smoke them anyway. Drinking alcohol may or may not have negative side effects, but even if it does, the government has no authority to prohibit you from consuming it, even if it is "in your own best interest." Since when do we let the government decide what is or isn't good for us? What the hell does Congress know about nutrition, anyway? (For that matter, what does Congress know about the Constitution?) If the government can use force whenever something is "in our best interest" then government should force everyone to wake up at 6am every morning for calisthenics in the front yard. Fast food establishments should be torn down and replaced with bars that serve carrot juice and alfalfa sprouts, since - "it's in your best interest."”

Michael Badnarik (1954) American software engineer

This paternalistic attitude that "the government knows best" and that you are merely a helpless child is insulting and reprehensible. Hitler used the same attitude to persuade the Germans to subjugate themselves to the "Fatherland."
Source: Good to be King (2004)

Alcohol, Food, Hell, Drink

“Did one man write Shui Hu Chuan, or did it grow to its present shape, added to, rearranged, deepened and developed by many minds and many a hand, in different centuries? Who can now tell? They are dead. They lived in their day and wrote what in their day they saw and heard, but of themselves they have told nothing.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Dead

“Richard Heffner: You say "We can create ourselves and our future"
Salk: — by shaping our selves not our cells — thats the important distinction. … We are shaping our cells, but we will not change our selves in the course of shaping our cells.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

The Open Mind interview (1985)

Change, Future

“You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die.”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

1995, p. 229; As cited in: Jay W. Rojews (2004) International Perspectives on Workforce Education and Development. p. xi
1980s - 1990s, High Output Management (1983)

World

“No, no. Bill should play two or three more years. Talk to him. Tell him he can get in shape. I know he can play better second base than anybody. He is two years younger than I am. He is the greatest second baseman of all time, a real super star. But people forget too fast what he has done for the Pirates. Nobody I ever saw could field with him. He won the World Series with his home run against the Yankees. I don't like to see him retire.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Sidelights on Sports: Monday Morning's Sports Wash" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XOANAAAAIBAJ&sjid=u2wDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7387%2C128274 by Al Abrams, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Monday, October 2, 1972), p. 24 <br class="br">Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1972</big>

People, World, Home, Star

“For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are 'of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated'. Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience. [in the catalogue introduction for the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still]”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

in Art of this Century, February 12 – March 2, 1946, Peggy Guggenheim Papers on the work of Clyfford Still; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 203
1940's

Painting

“Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering. In forms that established themselves in China, Buddhism offered the same sort of comfort to bereaved survivors and victims of violence or of disease as Christian faith did in the Roman world. Buddhism of course originated in India, where disease incidence was probably always very high as compared with civilizations based in cooler climates; Christianity, too, took shape in the urban environments of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria where the incidence of infectious disease was certainly very high as compared to conditions in cooler and less crowded places. From their inception, therefore, both faiths had to deal with sudden death by disease as one of the conspicuous facts of human life. Consequently, it is not altogether surprising that both religions taught that death was a release from pain, and a blessed avenue of entry upon a delightful afterlife where loved ones would be reunited, and earthly injustices and pains amply compensated for.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.3.

Love, Life, Death, Pain

“To appreciate the nature of fractals, recall Galileo's splendid manifesto that "Philosophy is written in the language of mathematics and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which one wanders about in a dark labyrinth." Observe that circles, ellipses, and parabolas are very smooth shapes and that a triangle has a small number of points of irregularity. Galileo was absolutely right to assert that in science those shapes are necessary. But they have turned out not to be sufficient, "merely" because most of the world is of infinitely great roughness and complexity. However, the infinite sea of complexity includes two islands: one of Euclidean simplicity, and also a second of relative simplicity in which roughness is present, but is the same at all scales.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

World, Mathematics, Nature, Science

“That is why so many Sorelians, like many people on the Left both before and after the war, slid into fascism. When these leftists of all shapes and colors came to the conclusion that the working class had definitely beaten a retreat, they did not follow it into this attitude. Their socialism remained revolutionary when that of the proletariat had ceased to be so. Having to choose between the proletariat and revolution, they chose revolution; having to choose between a proletarian but moderate socialism and a nonproletarian but revolutionary and national socialism, they opted for the nonproletarian revolution, the national revolution.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 27

War, People, Color

“In China's communist era, despite all of the rhetoric about internationalism and "liberation of mankind" during the Mao years, the regime, especially in its claims to legitimacy, has consistently stressed nationalism. Nationalism has taken different forms at different stages - an arrogant, bellicose style under Mao; a pragmatic, defensive style under Deng Xiaoping; and a resurgence of the arrogant, bellicose style under Jiang Zemin - but the underlying passions that shape the policies have always been caught up in a vicious cycle between self-abasement and self-aggrandizement.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

"Bellicose and Thuggish: The Roots of Chinese "Patriotism" at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century" (2002)
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

Passion

“I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by innumerable trials and efforts. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Cconversation with W.C. Seitz, in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 94
after 1970

World, Color, Feeling, Effort

“While we can doubtless look to some wide changes in the shapes of social relationships as a result of contemporary libertarian movements, and especially to an increase in workers' involvement in decision-making at the place of work and in the development of forms of democracy more direct and more sensitive to modern conditions, it is unlikely that the general outcome will be the wholly non-governmental society of which libertarians now and in the past have dreamed. The value of anarchism is likely to remain primarily in its force as an inspiring idea, an activating vision…”

George Woodcock (1912–1995) Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic

Postscript (July 1973)
Anarchism : A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962)

Dreams, Democracy, Idea, Decision

“I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

letter to Clyfford Still, undated; as quoted in Mark Rothko : A Biography (1993), James E. B. Breslin / and Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 170
after 1970, posthumous

Life, Pain, Pleasure

“Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof. Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him. He was seeing—them.”

Philip K. Dick book The Hanging Stranger

"The Hanging Stranger"
The Phillip K. Dick Reader

“Bottom trawls—large bag-shaped nets towed over the sea floor—account for more of the world's catch of fish, shrimp, squid, and other marine animals than any other fishing method. But trawling also disturbs the sea floor more than any other human activity, with increasingly devastating consequences for the world's fish population.”

Carl Safina (1955) American biologist

[Scorched-Earth Fishing, Issues in Science and Technology, 14, 3, Spring 1998, 33–36, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43313863]

World, Fish, Animals, Sea

“The cultural obsession with the art object is slowly disappearing and being replaced by what might be called "systems consciousness." Actually, this shifts from the direct shaping of matter to a concern for organizing quantities of energy and information. Seen another way, it is a refocusing of aesthetic awareness – based on future scientific-technological evolution – on matter-energy information exchanges and away from the invention of solid artefacts. These new systems prompt us not to look at the skin of objects, but at those meaningful relations within and between their visible boundaries.”

Jack Burnham (1931) American art historian

Source: Beyond Modern Sculpture, 1968, p. 369-70

Art, Way, Future

“In the history of madness, two events signal this change with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad in chains at Bicêtre. Between these two singular and symmetrical events, something happened, whose ambiguity has perplexed historians of medicine: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some, and, according to others, the progressive discovery, by science and philanthropy, of madness in its positive truth. In fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure was taking shape, which did not undo that ambiguity but was decisive for it. This structure explains the passage from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to the experience that is our own, which confines madness in mental illness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Preface to 1961 edition
History of Madness (1961)

Truth, History, Decision, Science

“The essence of modernism lies in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting - the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment - came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

1960s, Modernist Painting (1960)

Art, Support, Painting

“As a noun, design is the named (although sometimes unnamable) structure or behavior of a system whose presence resolves or contributes to the resolution of a force or forces on that system. A design thus represents one point in a potential decision space. A design may be singular (representing a leaf decision) or it may be collective (representing a set of other decisions).
As a verb, design is the activity of making such decisions. Given a large set of forces, a relatively malleable set of materials, and a large landscape upon which to play, the resulting decision space may be large and complex. As such, there is a science associated with design (empirical analysis can point us to optimal regions or exact points in this design space) as well as an art (within the degrees of freedom that range beyond an empirical decision; there are opportunities for elegance, beauty, simplicity, novelty, and cleverness).
All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Grady Booch (2006) " On design https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/gradybooch/entry/on_design?lang=en" cited in: Frank Buschmann, ‎Kevlin Henney, ‎Douglas C. Schmidt (2007) Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, On Patterns and Pattern Languages. p. 214

Beauty, Art, Behavior, Optimism

“While the arm is strong to strike and heave,
Let soul and arm give shape that will abide…”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

Soul, Strong

“I understand the world through music and I believe that music shapes the universe. Mankind has always had a sense of wonder about space, has always been curious. It's something that's implanted in us. It's natural to want to travel and discover. It is, always has been, and is always going to be like this. We are space.”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

2001

World, Music, Travel, Understanding

“You really could call the new TVR Cerbera heavy metal were it not fashioned from plastic. The best way to experience this car is to be about seven miles away. As it comes toward you, it's like being in a horror movie. The monster is getting closer. The Thing. The Blob. Terror has no shape. But God, what a noise.”

Jeremy Clarkson book Born to be Riled

Source: Born to be Riled (1999), p. 6

God, Cars, Way, Fashion

“I have to believe… the reason I got the part is that in their eyes I represented the character and what he’d really be like if he were alive. But the reason I represented him is that as a kid growing up I constantly thought about it. I was a bit of a loner. I used to come back home from school and then while I was kicking a ball against the wall for hours, I’d daydream about this. I really believe this shapes our lives and brings things to us. Fans like to think that there’s an element of kismet when an actor is cast as a superhero — that the actor was somehow fated to play the character. I believe that if there is such a thing that it would apply in my case. If you look at my screen test, which you can see online, you can see the dedication that I had… even in the screen test. I was so into it, that for me, it was real.”

Burt Ward (1945) American actor

Burt Ward — A Slice of SciFi Interview http://www.sliceofscifi.com/2011/04/27/burt-ward-a-slice-of-scifi-interview/ (April 27, 2011)

Fate, School, Home, Thinking

“True Christian love cherished in the heart and exemplified in the life, would teach us to put the best possible construction upon the course of our brethren. We should be as jealous of their reputation as of our own. If we are forever suspecting evil, this very fact will so shape their course of action as to produce the very evil which we have allowed ourselves to suspect. In this way, a great many difficulties are manufactured that otherwise would never have had birth, and brethren are often wronged by our being suspicious, free to judge their motives, and express our opinion to others in regard to their actions. That which one may be ready to construe into grave wrongs, may be no more than we ourselves are chargeable with every day.”

Ellen G. White (1827–1915) American author and founder/leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church

The Review and Herald (15 April 1880); also in Mind, Character, and Personality (1977), Vol. 2, p. 789

Love, Life, Way, Motivation

“To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Quote of Richter on his 'Grey Paintings', in a letter to nl:Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Grey-paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/grey-paintings-9 <br class="br">1970's <br class="br">Variant: It [grey color] makes no statement whatever... It has the capacity that no other color has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape (note 99).... but, grey like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea.... The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of color.

Idea, Painting, Indifference

“Obviously, the intention was not to go back to images traditionally valued as worthy or holy images and shapes, but exactly the opposite; its main purpose had to be, to realise as sacred art anything which so far had been regarded as of little value and pitiful.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

quote from 1988
1981 - 1990
Source: Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003, Achim Sommer, Kunsthalle Emden, Altana 2004, p. 38

Art, Quotes

Quotes about shape page 4

Quotes about shape
page 4