"Formalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... In the sixteenth century the tea-room afforded a welcome respite from labour to the fierce warriors and statesmen engaged in the unification and reconstruction of Japan. In the seventeenth century, after the strict formalism of the Tokugawa rule had been developed, it offered the only opportunity possible for the free communion of artistic spirits. Before a great work of art there was no distinction between daimyo, samurai, and commoner. Nowadays industrialism is making ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... sociological motivation, contains absolutely nothing but struggle itself. The worthless markers, for the sake of which men often play with the same earnestness with which they play for gold pieces, indicate the formalism of this impulse which, even in the play for gold pieces, often far outweighs the material interest. The thing to be noticed, however, is that, in order that the foregoing situations may occur, certain sociological forms—in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... remark as a disparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that the critic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, under whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism. The persistent identification of everything in nature with everything else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... inductive invention in Bacon: and | their meaning is quite different. | With the rule of certainty and | liberty, Bacon aims at directiy | opposing the old logic, infected by | syllogistic or rhetoric formalism. | | By its title, the NOVUM ORGANUM makes | Bacon's ambition clear: to replace | the Aristotelian organon, which has | governed all knowledge until the end | of the sixteenth century with an | entirely new logical instrument, a | new method for the progress and | profit of ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... space to do so to more than a very limited extent; yet two reflections seem to force themselves upon us as the result of the archæological enquiries which have produced the last three chapters of this work. One of these is the evil consequences of a barren formalism in religion. The monkish perfunctory services, with their “vain repetitions” and “long players,” reduced the individual well-nigh to the level of a praying machine, which could run off, as it were, from the reel, so many litanies in a given time, with little effort of intellect, and only ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... deny their grandeur and beauty; but the Bible brings me into another world of thought and feeling,—into a new creation. And when we take into the account the Gospels, we seem to be brought alike out of the old philosophy and the new,—out both from the old formalism and the vast inane and unknown, which the science of to-day conceives of, into new and living relations with the Infinite Love and Goodness. In this, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the vital religion of ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... yet for helping one of the most indispensable of all educational institutions—the poet. Would that he might realize how little good the poet of genius can derive from the universities—places whose conservative formalism is even dangerous to his originality, because they try to melt him along with all the other students and pour him into their one mold. It is distressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... and the Church, which arose out of the circumstances of its first publication. And modern history is more than anything else the history of the long process whereby this logical necessity manifested itself in fact. The negative spirit of the Middle Age, its asceticism, its dualism, its formalism, its tendency to transform the moral opposition of natural and spiritual into an external opposition between two natural worlds, present and future, and thus to substitute "other-worldliness" for worldliness, instead of substituting unworldliness for both—all ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... a civilized achievement, he will require much expert knowledge. Yet he need not be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in choosing experts. It is better indeed that the statesman should have a lay, and not a professional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity and empty formalism are always near and always dangerous. The real political genius stands between the actual life of men, their wishes and their needs, and all the windings of official caste and professional snobbery. It is his supreme ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... petition granted only encourages him to another. Six times he pleads, and God waits till he has done before He goes away; He cannot leave His friend till that friend has said all his say. What a contrast the fiery fervour and unwearying pertinacity of Abraham's prayers make to the stiff formalism of the intercessions one is familiar with! The former are like the successive pulses of a volcano driving a hot lava stream before it; the latter, like the slow flow of a glacier, cold and sluggish. Is any part of our public or private worship more hopelessly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... whole elaborate mass forward into the obscured nave. The darkness of vaults and side-chapels is overwrought with vague frescoes, most of them by Giotto and his school, out of which confused richness the terribly distinct little faces characteristic of these artists stare at you with a solemn formalism. Some are faded and injured, and many so ill-lighted and ill-placed that you can only glance at them with decent conjecture; the great group, however— four paintings by Giotto on the ceiling above the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... always to have chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as the wind takes them with all the grace, but with none of the formalism, of fountains; dividing into fanciful change of dash and spring, yet with the seal of their granite channels upon them, as the lightest play of human speech may bear the seal of past toil, and closing back out of their spray to lave the rigid angles, and brighten with ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... any authoritative and codifying consensus seems to him paradoxical. Style, in his view, unless it is something wholly uncharacterizable, is a vague and impalpable spirit breathing through the work of some strongly marked individuality, or else it is formalism. He delights in the fantasticality of the Gothic. The west facade of Rouen inspires him more than all the formulae of Palladian proportions. He detests systematization. He reads Shakespeare, Schiller, Dante almost exclusively. He sees visions ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... is a moral, would not there be a sad disfigurement? Men and women with lips blacker than coal! It is a wise prayer, "Let the words of my mouth be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord." Deceit, flattery, formalism in prayer are abominable to God. It would be well if, when in church or chapel, we could see it in plain letters, "The Lord will not hold him guiltless that ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... start work," he said. "The colonel was quite right yesterday and spoke like a real business man. In our respect for narrow formalism, we stupidly ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... thorough knowledge of its mathematics. Upon this foundation he superimposes a structure of audacity. But he often falls into one error or another, for all his mental brilliancy. He may become rigidly formal in his practice, or, in a revolt from his own formalism, be seduced into a display of showy, sensational tricks that are all very well in the studio but dangerous to their practitioner on the ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... religion and morality seems almost complete and it is not strange that most modern writers speak of the Roman religion as a tiresome ritual formalism, almost wholly lacking in ethical value. And yet it did not present itself in this light to the Romans themselves. Cicero, sceptic as he was, could speak of it as the cause of Rome's greatness; Augustus, the practical politician, could believe that its revival was an essential condition ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... the reactionary movement in literature and art at the close of last century and at the beginning of this against the cold and spiritless formalism and pseudo-classicism that then prevailed, and was more regardful of correctness of expression than truth of feeling and the claims of the emotional nature; has been defined as the "reproduction in modern ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... dispute the hegemony of taste. Nevertheless, although it is impossible to reach a pure aesthetic judgment, we ought to strive to approach it, and, by dint of training and clear thinking about art, we can approach it. We ought to do this, not because of any formalism or purism, but for the sake of preserving the unique value of art, which is covered up or destroyed by the intrusion of non-aesthetic standards of judgment. For judgment does influence feeling, especially such a delicate and subtle thing as aesthetic feeling. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... than the other. In fact, we ought, perhaps, to make a special order by itself from the New Testament writings. They are so full of life, light, and love—they are so strong yet so tender—so pure yet so free! They have no cant of piety, no formalism, but breathe throughout a heavenly atmosphere. Their inspiration is of the highest ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the first, opened with fierce ecclesiastical tumult. Whitefield's itineracy, like the blazing cross in the Lady of the Lake, was the signal for an uprising. Fired by his passionate oratory, the masses revolted from the chill formalism of a dead ministry. The effect of the excitement which pervaded New England, when considered merely as an appetizer of the intellect, can not be over-estimated, and the vigor which the colonial mind thus acquired astonished in an after day the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... politicians vied with the king in passing laws for the subjugation of Church and State, and in their thirst for revenge upon all who had been connected with Cromwell's iron government. Once more a wretched formalism—that perpetual danger to the English Church—came to the front and exercised authority over the free churches. The House of Lords was largely increased by the creation of hereditary titles and estates for ignoble men and shameless ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... foreign laws with which the Romans were brought into contact. In turn it reacted upon the more narrow law of Roman citizens (ius civile), broadening its conceptions and enabling it to free itself from primitive formalism. It also made easier the task of Roman governors who were called upon to administer the various laws of the different countries which came to form the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... universe. And if secularists have not always grasped this necessity, we may perhaps find therein one main reason why secularism has not met with so enormous and enthusiastic a reception as the languor and formalism of the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... slain. Only through His blood is there salvation for any one. He is now allowing man fullest opportunity before He comes to set things right. This is the in-between time, much lengthened out. In the midst of formalism and subtle compromise, the tangling of ideas and issues, and the blurring of vision within His Church, He calls to His own blood-bought ones to ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... Germany counted on our submission and abstention was not altogether unfounded, though it was, thank God, unfulfilled. The full fruition of our alliances against freedom had come. The meek acceptance of Kultur in our books and schools had stiffened what was once a free country with a German formalism and a German fear. By a queer irony, even the same popular writer who had already warned us against the Prussians, had sought to preach among the populace a very Prussian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance of ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... England, must be regarded as a protest against the moralizing bigotry of the classical school no less than against its antiquated formalities. The men who raised it were themselves not free from the charge of formalism; but the forms they worshipped were at least those inspired by the spontaneous genius of the artist, not the mechanical rules inherited from the traditions of the past. Nor, whatever may be the case ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... ceremonies were of little importance in his eyes when they stood in the way of the direct and practical, and he abolished hosts of ancient customs that had grown wearisome and unmeaning. This sweeping away of the drift-wood of the past was far from agreeable to the officials, to whom formalism and precedent were as the breath of life. One of the ancient customs required the emperors to ascend high mountains and offer sacrifices on their summits. The literary class had ancient rule and precedent for every step in this ceremony, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... boldly defending the baldest Zwinglianism, remarked with respect to the symbolists that, in a way, their success involved a certain blessing, inasmuch as they would serve as "an ecclesiastical sewer into which sooner or later the dead formalism, the cold, heartless ritualism, and the lager-beer Lutheranism of this country would find its way." (L. u. W. 1867, 125.) Even the Lutheran Observer was censured by the American Lutheran for becoming too conservative. (L. u. W. 1875, 375.) But the difference was one ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente |
