Form Quotes

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

The forms have value only so far as they are expressions of the life within. If they have ceased to express life, crush them out without mercy.

Reality is blocked by form and image.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble? Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood. One form suggested a woman to him, another a buffalo, still another the head of a monster.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

The perfect square lacks corners.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

Let cloud shapes swarm, / Let chaos storm, / I wait for form.

A wave in the ocean is a wave, only in so far as it is bound by name and form.

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured,--is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.

In nature alone are forms. That which is not of nature cannot have any forms, fine or gross. It must be formless.

Once out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Whatsoever has form must be the result of combinations of particles and requires something else behind it to move it.

Everything that occupies space has form. The formless can only be infinite.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

What other movement determines the S line? Its aesthetic efficacity has long been noted by artists.

Everything is substance plus name and form. Name and form come and go, but substance remains ever the same.

Life always is now, but the form the now takes changes continuously. Most people equate the form the now takes with the now itself, and so they believe there are many different moments.

Freedom can never be true of name and form; it is the clay out of which we (the pots) are made; then it is limited and not free, so that freedom can never be true of the related. One pot can never say "I am free" as a pot; only as it loses all ideas of form does it become free.

To love is to recognize yourself in another. The others "otherness" then stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form.

Everything that has form must have a beginning and an end.

We have none of us seen a form which had not a beginning and will not have an end.

When you see around you the human form suffering or dissolving, you have empathy on the human level. You share the suffering because it has to do with the fleetingness of form. But if that is the only level that operates in you, you haven't gone beyond suffering.

Have you noticed that bones are always modeled and not carved, that you always have the impression they come from a mold, that they were first modeled in clay? Any bone you look at, you always find fingerprints on it.